


Selkie Wife

by the_desk_fairy



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: A/B/O Adjacent, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Breeding, Brendol Hux's A+ Parenting, Complete, Crashing a car into the ocean, D/s, F/M, GingerRose Kink Weeks, Guaranteed HEA, Gun Violence, Hitting, Major character seperation, Mating, Pregnancy, Pregnancy Kink, Selkie Rose Tico, Selkie/Lighthouse Keeper, Soft Armitage Hux, Suicide Attempt by Drowning, graphic gore and blood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-21
Updated: 2020-10-30
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:14:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 26,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26575849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_desk_fairy/pseuds/the_desk_fairy
Summary: He's a soft-spoken lighthousekeeper's son.She's a magical seal woman.He wants to put his shattered ego back together and find out where he belongs.She wants something too.But it's not what he expected.
Relationships: Armitage Hux/Reader, Armitage Hux/Rose Tico, Armitage Hux/You
Comments: 64
Kudos: 95
Collections: GingerRose Kink Weeks





	1. Rescue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PastelWonder](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PastelWonder/gifts).



> This one's for [PastelWonder](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PastelWonder/pw) who's brilliant prose and fearless presence on the GingerRose Discord has got me digging deeper and writing more boldly about feelings that scare me so... HERE WE GO!
> 
> Oi! Mind those tags, eh?
> 
> Trigger warning: suicidal ideation, suicide plan, attempted suicide by drowning.

> _"Tak thoo heed theesel, fur thou'll mibbe be yursel' bewitched wan day."_
> 
> _Heed well what you say, you will maybe be bewitched yourself one day._
> 
> _-The Selkie Wife, an Orkney Legend_
> 
> * * *

_Anacortes, Washington_

_March 12, 1988_

The nose of the skiff bites through sand as Armitage pushes it into the churning black water. A big shove, two steps and he leaps into the boat’s hull. Wind whips the hood of his jacket against his cheeks; the spray scatters icy droplets across tender, raw bruises on his face. Boiling sea froths about the skiff; it tips left and right as he climbs into place.

He grips the oar handles, his hands shaking. The drowning wail of the storm covers his grunts as he hauls backward, shooting the boat across the swirling water. Like a sharp stab, his wrist throbs deeply. He cusses and wonders if it’s sprained.

_ No matter now.  _

The current here is strong and drags Armitage out away from the thin ribbon of shoreline. The farther he rows, the taller the waves loom, the harder the rain pelts, but he doesn’t feel it. Why bother anymore? Who cares if the endless, airless black cold sucks him into the Skagit Bay or the middle of the Pacific Ocean? It’s all the same to him, though he’d prefer to meet the darkness farther away, out of sight from the tall lighthouse’s blinking eye.

_ I’m really doing this _ .

His throat catches, but he refuses to feel. He braces himself, just as he had when his father stormed at him earlier in the kitchen.

_ Where did you find these? Out with it, boy!  _

_ In a shoe box, u...under the bed. _

_ You oughtta fucking know better! Come here! _

_ Please…! _

_ You want to know who this is, boy? _

_ No! _

_ Do you think you know who this is, you bastard whoreson? _

_ Mmmf! Augh, God! Forget it! _

_ Hold still, you dirty little weasel, you lurked around through my shit, I’ll tell you exactly who this is. _

_ Stop!  _

_ It’s your lying bitch, whore of a mother. _

_ Fuck you! _

The lighthouse winks at him. Its searching, swiveling beacon grows smaller and smaller. An enormous, freight-ship-sized wave lifts the boat up like the peak of a mountain, but from this vista he can only see engulfing vastness. Dark water, heavy sky, empty life.

His stomach plunges as the skiff dips back down into the valley of the waves. 

_ Now or never, I guess. _

Armitage stands, the boat rocking alarmingly under his feet. The sea slurps and gurgles around the hollow hull, but he’s not sure he has the courage to take that final step. A spay of salt water splashes his wind-stung skin, a cruel tease of the frigid waters below.

Legs shaking, he gets up slowly and the skiff starts to skims out from under his feet.

_ Oh, shit! _

Now he’s scrambling. The boat skirts to the left and he pitches to the right.

He plunges. 

Cold shock. No air.

His first thought is that he feels lighter than he has in years. He is weightless, oddly free.

Then, ice seeps into his bones. Bubbles sing around his ears and the air in his chest gently tugs him upwards. He considers fighting against his rise toward the glimmering flashes of light above, but in the end, his body pulls him to the surface whether he likes it or not.

He breaks above water with a gasp. Instinctively, Armitage churns the water with slow, steady strokes. Cold breaths saw in and out of his open mouth, salt stings his eyes. 

Minutes drag by.

Little grunts and condensation puff out of his mouth as he struggles to stay above the swirling blackness. He’s shivering, and his teeth clatter like oar joints rattling in their sockets. Shouldn’t be long now. The pit of his stomach bubbles with dread. What will that final, watery breath feel like? He closes his eyes and clenches his teeth.

A massive splash flings droplets onto Armitage’s numb face. He blinks.

“Help!”

The watery cry can’t be mistaken.

A jolt of alertness hits his veins like steroid shot, numbness fades.

“Hello?” he shouts.

“Help me!”

Not four yards away, in the shadows of the water’s seething surface, someone reaches toward the moonless sky. He stirs to life, and he beats the water faster. Without deliberation, he stretches out into a crawl stroke, kicking toward the struggling form. 

But the surface of the water is empty.

Heart thundering in his throat, Armitage claws his jacket loose from around his shoulders and kicks out of his galoshes. He sucks in a deep breath and plunges beneath the waves. Shoving the water aside with long swipes of his arms, he kicks madly.

He hits something soft and animal. 

The sleek side of a watery creature bellies up to him and for a flash of a second, he imagines a strong tail beating against his legs. His arms close around the shape and he finds it’s not what he thought: it’s a soft, feminine waist. A tangle of fine, long hair whispers against his fingers. Someone slips her soft hands around the back of his neck.

Bubbles trail from Armitage’s lips in surprise. It is too dark in those watery depths to see her, but he clings to her.

With a forceful grip under her shoulders, he carries her upward, flutter kicking until they break into air. She gasps raggedly, her little coughs wisping against his neck make his chest squeeze.

“Easy now, easy,” he murmurs.

Her head rests against his neck. After a few watery sputters, her sobbing breaths begin to slow, catching now in then with a tiny gasp.

“It’s alright,” Armitage whispers, his lips brushing her cold tendrils of wet hair. “I have you.”

His legs work double time to keep them above water, but he doesn’t notice. Shyly, he moves one thumb comfortingly against her skin. Then it hits him like a bolt of lightning: two thick, shapely legs wrap around his waist. Naked legs.

Heat floods his cheeks as the hard planes of his chest sense the generous give of her curves. Even beneath the veil of night, he knows she is beautiful.

“Let’s get you to shore,” he says.

She murmurs slightly, almost a mew. 

Clutching the woman, Armitage swims with furtive digging and clawing motions, struggling with his sprained wrist. His legs pump twice as hard trying to inch them toward the shore. At first she feels warm against him, as if her sleek skin carries a layer of heat, but as he kicks toward the shoreline, she begins to shiver. 

“Can you hold on to me from behind?” Armitage asks. His nose brushes against her damp cheek accidentally.

He hears a creaky reply. It sounds like someone just waking up, voice still cluttered with sleep.

“Aye,” she says.

The water crinkles around her as she shifts behind him and draws her arms around his chest. Her body floats behind his. 

Armitage swims more easily this way, and he tows her to shore. Her gentle curves drift and bump against him sometimes. Each surface impresses its delicious softness upon him in heightened detail: a silky leg brushing his ankle, a breast pillowing against his shoulder blade. He wonders if the hot blood coursing through him is what keeps him from becoming hypothermic.

After the endless strokes all but melt his limbs into rubber, his feet hit the rocky bottom. Boneless, his exhausted legs buckle forward and he crawls, dragging her with him. The heavy rain has lessened to a spitting drizzle and it mists their faces as he hauls them among the breakers onto the pebbly beach. A spent groan wrings from his lungs.

Armitage is about to say something when the woman slides onto the rocky shore and flops down against his side.

He sits up. A frothing rush of saltwater gathers around them before sucking back into the tide. There is no moon, but the faint shift in the storm above casts an eerie grey glow that illuminates her somewhat. She curls into a ball, arms wrapped around her legs, face buried in her knees. Long shining hair, black as the midnight ocean, sticks wetly to her body in wild Medusa coils.

He reaches for her, tremoring with fatigue and uncertainty, placing his hand chastely on her shoulder. She unfurls, opening toward him, her eyes still closed. Though her arms cross over her breasts, Armitage can see everything: all the smooth crests and gullies of her soft, rippling body. Her face glows, playful and coy as an otter, her neck curves gracefully. Her skin is rich and luminous as a shining salmon, from her decolletage down to the shining v of dark hair between her thick, lustrous legs. His throat knots as he looks at her.

Feathery eyelashes, like little wings, open and close slowly. Two clear brown eyes peer up at him. 

“Can you stand?” he asks hoarsely.

“I've never been on my feets” she says with a thick, old-world burr like something Armitage has seen in pirate movies or British TV shows.

_ Feets?  _ He blinks quickly.  _ Is she… simple? _

It perplexes him more when the strange woman clambers onto her knees and plants a steadying hand on his shoulder. She puts wobbly legs underneath her. Her brow scrunches with concentration, then, she gains stability and breaks into a wide smile.

“Ye’ve not seened a selkie?” 

Her voice sparkles, like the little creek that runs from the woods down to the sandy beach behind the lighthouse. He can’t place her accent; Irish? Scottish? But with bad grammar? He has no idea what she just said, but he’s caught by those clever, beady eyes.

“I sayed… ye dinna ken what I am?”

He’s got to be off his rocker.  _ God, how hard did the old man actually hit me? _

“What are you?” he asks.

“I’m a selkie.”

He sits back, puzzled.

“Ye’ll take my coat, then?”

“Your coat?”

She points.

A long, lustrous grey fur coat with curious, amber-brown spots lies in a sopping heap, washed up right next to them. When he stands and bends over to pick it up, the diamond droplets slide off the coat like it repels water. The garment hangs heavy in his hand.

“What is this?” 

She laughs, shimmering and guileless. 

“Silly man,” she says. “Ye takes my coat, so I’m yer mate.”

Armitage’s heart dips into his wool stockings.

“I’m nobody’s…uh... no one’s mate!”

The woman—still naked as creation, he notices—slips toward him, her eyes flickering with predatory fascination. Her full, dark lips part, her tongue glides across vicious little teeth. His pulse surges with real fear. 

“Pretty shinyhouse boy…” The woman reaches up and brushes back the loose ruff of bronze hair on his forehead, her fingers graze featherlight against his skin. A sweet smell, almost like powdered donuts, fills his lungs as she gets closer. As a round, juicy breast squishes against him, air whooshes out from between his lips. 

“I didna save ye fer no reasons.”

His eyelids float closed with the lulling sensation of her fingertips sliding through his hair, but he manages to reply.

“I thought I saved you.”

“Ah nay, nay…” she scolds. Her hands are cupping his face now, thumbs brush the slopes of his gaunt cheeks, one side tracing a tender bruise. “Yer a sad one, yes?” 

Armitage doesn’t know what to say.

“Yer wicked father canna hurt ye with a selkie lass fer a mate!” she says, the feral glint of her eye making him nervous.

It frightens him that this stranger knows about his father, the hitting, the despair. He needs to get away from her. The coat drops from his hands and thumps onto the rocky beach in a grey pile. 

She cusses incoherently, scooping the shining cloak off the beach and picking bits of sand and rocks from its glowy fur. When she looks up, he is hastening up the hill toward tufts of tall, yellowed grass.

“Och, dinna go, shinyhouse boy!” she calls after him.

_ He is a fast leg-walker, my mate _ , the selkie thinks. 

A tickle of annoyance buzzes deep in her flanged vocal chords, but she kens this will take time. Land mates are the worstest for getting catched quick. And this is the bonniest land boy she has ever seened. Wi’ his fire red hair and stormish eyes, his skin bright like the moonbeam flesh of a porpoise.

She trails behind him, wondering if she shoulda been tricksier and keeped pretending to be scared. Shinyhouse boy feeled better when he was worryful about her, she ponders. She sensed the sads in his body go away when he catched her in the water. He forgot his bad feelings to be helpish, just like selks do when the orcas attack. Selkies survive ‘acause they’re fierce and protectly for their mates. 

He choosed her, she kens. He responded to her wee voice, taked her from the sea and assepted her coat. He’s hers now.

_ Silly mate, _ she purrs, watching him scramble over the bluff and run toward the distant spire of the shinyhouse. The selkie woman’s steps are wobbly at first, but she finds more steadiness when the bumpy pebbles turn to soft sand, and the soft sand turns to a grassy embankment. She sips strength from the gusts of salty, damp wind. Tipping her head back, she laughs. Selk girl, walking on the land.  _ Ha. _

  
  


Armitage scrambles into the lighthouse; the only home he’s known his whole life.

He slams the door shut and fumbles with the bolt, running to the windows and drawing closed the thick, slightly musty curtains. His body aches and bruises throb, but for all his misadventures on this night, his veins are still racing with energy. A slight drip drip grabs his attention and he sees his canvas dungarees weeping onto the faded linoleum. He’s suddenly conscious of the sopping, icy-wet clothes clinging to his skin. It doesn’t match the heat pulsing through him.

_ How am I extremely hot right now? _ Armitage wonders.

It’s usually easier to cope when he doesn’t feel, when he doesn’t connect with the aching contact points all over his body: marks reminding him of what happened earlier that night. He’s gotten good at chugging along, ignoring his body. It’s always a surprise when an ingrown toenail gets infected or a negligible cough becomes a trip to ER for pneumonia. That’s why he’s shocked when, at this inopportune moment, the hardness between his legs speaks and he listens.

_ What does a naked sea woman want with me?  _ he asks. His cock answers, stabbing the fly of his thick work pants. The image of her lavish little body draped out on the tide-smoothed pebbles makes the rhythm of his breathing double.

“Hell no,” he whispers to himself, squinching his eyes shut.

He is poised to retreat into the shelter of his bedroom when he hears hissing and scratching outside. Unable to resist, he lifts the corner of the curtain and peeps out. The porch light is still on, as it always is when father goes into town at night, and this affords him the strangest view.

The sea woman sprawls in the half-wine barrel of petunias he planted on the porch. She reclines like it's a lawn chair. 

_ What the devil? _ Armitage squints. 

A few yards away, one of the lighthouse cats arches at her in fright, its hair standing on end and ears flattened. The selkie yawns at the cat, unbothered. Her legs dangle over the edge of the wine barrel, pedaling back and forth like she’s bored.

_ “Uuuuurrrrrooooowww,”  _ the cat swallows a threatening, long note. 

Selkie leans forward like a queen regarding an unruly peasant. She lets out a low, grating bark that startles the silent voyeur at the window out of his skin. The cat skibbles out of sight.

Armitage jolts again with the familiar rickety, bucking clatter of father’s truck coming up the gravel drive. 

_ Christ. _ He scrambles. 

It would have been better if the man had passed out in the parking lot at Skippers, but it wasn’t to be. Actually, Armitage remembers with a sick plunge in his gut, he had originally planned that his father would never come home to his son again.

_ And now look at me, _ he chides himself,  _ I’ve brought a deranged woman back to the lighthouse.  _

Right away, Armitage’s prey instinct kicks in. He’s lived on eggshells long enough to know that anything out of the ordinary will set his father off. If their last altercation hadn’t already broken his spirit, what would his father do about a nude in the porch planter? Hurriedly, he flings open the door and skitters outside, ignoring the selkie’s happy yowl. He grasps her wrist. 

“Come!” he clips.

She makes all kinds of pleased little noises as he drags her through the narrow, 1940s-style cottage attached to the lighthouse. His mind whirrs like a spinning rolodex. Where does one hide a person who thinks they’re some kind of fish? Instinctively, he yanks her toward the bathroom. 

His eyes dart about. The lock is broken on the bathroom door. Will she fit in the towel closet? Gritting his teeth, he shoves back the white vinyl curtain and squeakily winches on the shower. 

“Look, this verra shiny rock sees me!” She coos and preens at her reflection in the mirror.

“Get in,” Armitage orders. 

He steps into the claw foot tub and holds her hands while she throws a leg over the side. Once she’s under the cold-turning-warm stream with him, he thrusts the curtain closed around them.

Footsteps echo in the house.

The selk bristles and a growl rattles in her chest. It’s not unlike the cat earlier: a threatening, battle noise, but deeper and raspier from a bigger, much more territorial animal. The young man’s mouth drops open slightly, that sound can’t be coming from the girl, can it?

“I kill him!” She starts to push Armitage aside.

The handle of the bathroom door rattles.

“Quiet!” He claps a hand over her mouth.

The bathroom door creaks open.

_ Bastard _ . Armitage seethes. Everything is a violation with Brendol.

“Fuck’s goin on in here,” Brendol says.

“A shower,” he replies, hoping to sound bland rather than terrified.

“Thought I heard voices.”

“You’re drunk.” He risks this pushback, hoping his father will go away. 

The selkie wriggles under Armitage’s grip. He tightens his hold around her waist and locks eyes with her, shaking his head. She stops, but something blooms in her gaze that makes the spot between his legs twitch. Rivulets of water trail from her black mane in serpentine tendrils down the smooth surfaces of her amber skin. Steam rises from between them; his soaking clothes feel heavy and cloying against his body.

“I’m leaving,” Brendol says. “Going down to the port for that new vent and the good roofing from Jackson’s.”

Bran’s outline stands stock still on the other side of the curtain: that loathsome, hateful shadow. Thank Poseidon, the bare lightbulb over the sink doesn’t illuminate the two silhouettes inside the tub.

“Fine.”

“I’m staying with Rudy,” Brendol continues. “He’s got Mariners tickets or some shit like that. Be back Thursday.”

_ Leave, please, leave now _ , Armitage breathes.

There’s a pause. He knows his father is still standing there, waiting for some kind of assurance that he’ll try not to fuck things up.

“I’ll call if there’s trouble,” Armitage says finally.

“Damn right you will…” Brendol mutters bitterly, a clink signals that his hand is on the bathroom door. “Don’t forget to clean the lamp. And check the reports about the thunderheads Wednesday.”

Armitage stiffens, feelings of indignation waft off him like the steam rising all around. 

_ How can he talk like everything is normal? After he beat me?  _

He is nearly shaking when the selk presses her cushioned contours against him. Relenting, Armitage sinks into her pillowy breasts, the give of her velvety middle and rounded thighs. He receives her body like someone starved of soft touches.

“Alright,” Armitage replies.

The door shuts without a goodbye, and they are left alone with the echoey sounds of water spraying against the puddle forming on the bottom of the chipped tub.

Armitage drops his hand from the selkie’s mouth, but he doesn’t let go of her waist. She circles her arms around him and allows the quietest purr to rumble in that lustrous, bare chest. 

Slow minutes. They wait for the sound of the slamming front door and the sputtering truck to recede into the night. They hold each other. 

The top of her head brushes against the hard line of his chin and he presses his lips to her raven hair: not really kissing, but perhaps just a little. 

The selkie turns her head, the tip of her nose tracing delicately along his neck. She draws in a deep breath and the air whisks cold against his skin. 

“Yer more calm wi’ me, shinyhouse boy,” she observes.

He pulls back, studying her face. His gaze sifts about her features as he slowly pushes out a hesitant breath. 

“I’m sorry,” Armitage whispers sadly. “My father…”

She silences him with soft coos and gentle strokes combing tinglingly through the sensitive hair behind his ears. Armitage can’t hold back a moan.

“Yer breaking my wee heart,” the selkie murmurs. “Yer like a lost seal pup.”

“Sorry,” he whispers.

“Dinna fash,” she says. The tips of her fingers trace a purple, whorling bruise along his ribs. “Mean man did this?”

Armitage doesn’t answer, but anger coils in his stomach.

The selkie’s gaze dims with dark violence, as if she’s synced up with the emotions swirling in Armitage’s body.

“He wilna touch ye again,” she growls.

“There’s not much you can do.”

“I’ll bite out his heart.”

He exhales like a small chuckle. “I appreciate the sentiment.”

They’re quiet for a while, letting the hot water wash away the angry, sad feelings. 

“You did…” he begins, stammering. His face blossoms with heat. “Save me… I mean.” 

Brokenness starts to spill out of an aching split in his chest, but he can’t explain why he’s so readily vulnerable with this strange person. Or strange creature? The burning knot that sits in the base of his throat is already untangling. A feeling washes over him like a warm, summer-salt breeze. Her touch imparts some primal sense of safety, belonging. 

_ This is what we have _ , he thinks.  _ Two strange, lost creatures: each clinging to the other for dear life. _ Maybe they were rather suited after all.

“I bein watching ye fix boats,” she says in her broad, Scottish burr. “Yer a bonny, smartish one, aye? Ye ken the best way to put all those wee metalish bits aright?”

“When did you watch me?” His questions are no longer recoiling. He reaches up absently and wipes a trail of water dripping down her smooth forehead.

“We swims under the docks a’searching fer wee crabs,” she recounts. “I like to pick the mussels off the pier and watch ye puzzle ower a broked wind boaty or one of those big big shippies they put up in the sky.”

“Oh…” Armitage’s brows draw together. “The lift? Down at Gordon’s on the marina? You’ve watched me working on the yachts and sailboats?”

“Aye.” Her purr intensifies. “Yer the best fixer boy, and so gentle wi’ yer hands, so clever wi’ carefulish things.” She inhales like her skin prickles to feel those hands everywhere.

His cheeks stain, unaccustomed to flattery. He does take pride in his meticulous, impeccable work and feels like no one really notices. Unconsciously, his protective grip on her waist loosens and skims down to the sumptuous swells of her cheeks.

Her soft hum fills the bathroom. She pulls back, her raw wanting sparking and glinting up at him from beneath long, feathery lashes. Whatever cracks have fissured up his broken ego, her worshipful glances invade, fill and patch up. Why does he already feel like she knows him, particularly in the ways he feels invisible to his father? She begins fussing with the buttons of the soaking wool button down plastered to his thin frame.

“Here, like this,” he whispers like it’s a secret. 

He doesn’t know why he’s undressing for her. His brain fogs. The rational foreground of his mind blurs, but it warns him that perhaps this woman’s intoxicating chemistry is overpowering his logic. Her powder-donut smell has deepened into a rich, layer-cake scent. He wants to put his head between her legs and taste that sugar glaze.

Armitage shows the selkie how to slip the buttons out and she chuffs, delighted. She pulls apart each one and unwraps him. Greedily peeling his white shirt up over his head, her throat vibrates happily when his body appears for her. Her hair sticks back sleek like a predator; her innocent face is wreathed with mist: a beautiful, angelic monster.

The glow of her naked skin draws something monstrous from him, too. A desire to ravage, to claim. To rake his teeth over her naked breasts and pin her sumptuous hips underneath his.  _ No _ , he thinks,  _ don’t be that guy. _

She reaches for his belt buckle. 

His brain flashes with warning, his heart leaps into his throat. This is why he’s so afraid to be turned on: he doesn’t like how out-of-control this side of him feels. 

“Not yet,” Armitage says, catching her wrist.

She makes a frustrated  _ mrrrow _ but lets go of his button fly.

“Ye can touch me,” she says.

He shakes his head in panic. 

“Ye have my coat, I’m yer mate,” she repeats this strange formula. “I’m yers.”

“I’ve never…” he chokes. “I don’t know how.”

“Silly,” she snorts. “Nobody kens how to please their mates afore they be together!”

“No but, I’ve never…” he tips his head, reeking with embarrassment. “...Done  _ it _ .” Finally he spits it out. “I’m a virgin.”

This word makes her lips bunch with confusion, but after thinking for a moment, she brings him a small, confident smile.

“Listen to yer body, ye ken how to do it,  _ mo mhiur _ .”

“What does that mean?” he asks, “Mo…”

_ “Mo mhiur _ .” Her expression softens. “My ocean.”

His face glimmers with a burst of acceptance and she takes his hand, placing the cup of it on one of her round, ripe breasts. His eyelids float closed and he inhales sharply. There’s more yield to its texture than he’s imagined; the way it pools in his hand like liquid makes his heart flail in his ribcage. He’s straining desperately inside his canvas pants. A gritty moan reverberates inside his mouth; senses heighten, breaths deepen. 

It’s happening again: the insanity. He’s never had to contend with it so strongly before.

With a hissing growl his other hand slides up from her hip, fingertips dragging in little red furrows up her plush skin. He kisses her, not in the sweet way of romantic films, but like a wolfish creature claiming his possession. 

Lips crash together, they drink in each other’s unhinged hunger. She relents against him, her soft mews resonating desperately between his lips as he consumes her. 

_ Mine.  _ A dark, primal voice inside him declares.

His hot, pulsing blood agrees with hers, their hearts thud together as tongues thrust and parry. Between kisses, she makes rasping, contented noises. Finally, the whiff of doubt has ceased and his pores are dripping with newfound power. She draws in that heady scent and feels the mechanics between her hips bloom and open like a ready flower.

“Come wi’ me?” Her shy upward glance shifts the energy between them.

Armitage’s face clenches, the little jaw muscle on the sides of his angular face working with his churning thoughts. 

She reads his pause.

“Selks make love by the sea,” she says.

The gentleness of her asking is so delicate, almost demure, it stokes the wildness in him again. Moments ago, she had been the pursuer: the one calling him her mate. 

Now, he sheds his trepidation and surrenders to his nature. 

He’s her master. He grips her wrist like he owns that heart glimmering with softness through her dark eyes. 

“Let’s go,” he says. 


	2. Eclipse

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> YO! [@PastelWonder](%E2%80%9Cnofollow%22) is the absolute QUEEN, not only inspiring this work but beta-ing this chapter. Dude. You have no idea what you mean to me, you are just an incredible human. *hugs*
> 
> TW: NSFW
> 
> Tunes: “Blinding Lights” by The Weeknd https://youtu.be/fHI8X4OXluQ

CHAPTER 2

_ Swiftly, swiftly flew the ship,  _

_ Yet she sailed softly too:  _

_ Sweetly, sweetly blew the breeze—  _

_ On me alone it blew. _

_ It raised my hair, it fanned my cheek  _

_ Like a meadow-gale of spring—  _

_ It mingled strangely with my fears,  _

_ Yet it felt like a welcoming. _

_ —The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,  _ Samuel Taylor Colerige (1834)

  
  


He steps out of the clawfoot tub and helps her short legs over its high porcelain lip with a tenderness that intensifies the edges of her desire for him. She flushes with happiness, her lips perk and her purrs deepen.

_ Perfect mate,  _ she thinks.  _ Already so gentleish. How careable and softly he will be wi’ me when... _

He opens the front door, revealing a dark shore hemmed with dripping pines. The rain and winds have stopped. 

She mrrps and chuffs laughingly. He drags her out of the lighthouse cottage and runs down the sandgrass hill with her in tow. They trip and his feet scuff up a skirt of wet sand; she loses her balance. The selkie and lighthouse keeper tumble down the fluffy dune and land in a white bed of tiny seashell chips, textured on the surface with a trail of dry, lacey seaweed.

He’s on top of her: his knees spread over her hips, his palms pressed to the prickly surface of the shells on either side of her face. The waves lapping up on the shore whoosh in unison with his tense exhales. Her hair is fanned out behind her like the reaching arms of a sea star, faint light touches her radiant skin.

“How lovely you are,” he remarks in a breath of a whisper. His lips trace the ridge of her luminous cheek. “You’re like the moon.”

“Ye ken I choosed a land mate a’cause I like to hear such pretty words.” She winks coyly.

His laugh grates low and self-possessed in his chest.  _ Who am I... _ his human prefrontal cortex wonders.

Their kisses escalate, feverish, trailing with glistening slip. His stiffness grinds against her through his work pants, the rumples of rigid canvas grazing roughly over her throbbing clit. 

“Do you want me to touch you?” He basses, lust seeping from his voice.

“Aye!”

A hand drifts like magnetism down between her legs; her hair is smooth: downy almost, her lips satiny wet. His throat catches when he slips a finger into her juicy seam. She feels slippery inside, like silken water plants.

“Here? Like this?” He strokes hesitatingly. 

“Och, not there, just here. Aye, that’s it. Ah! Faster!”

Air sucks into her like the foaming tide drawing back to sea; she squirms and writhes for more. Her cunt swallows two fingers, then three. He watches her split open for him, gushing. She tips her head back, brows furrowed, lips moving with breathless mews. 

When he feels her slip trailing thickly down his wrist, his heart punches his ribcage. 

“You’re so wet…” he says, his voice gravelly in her ear. He thrusts and swirls inside her, but it is she who is unlocking his wildness. The more his animal nature rises to meet hers, the more her pussy begs for him.

“Poseidon!” she gasps, “Arrrrrrgh fouk!”

“Hold still,” he orders. “I want to taste you.”

She freezes, the sounds of her scraping heels halting and giving way to a deep, rumbling purr.

He sits back and pushes her velvet thighs apart, dives between her legs where the syrupy cake scent is thickest. Between folds of shimmery dark hair, her gleaming lips open up to him; they blush with arousal, burning raw from his punishing touch. He kisses one petal sweetly, breath steaming against her sex.

His tongue darts up and down in the places she showed him. A fat upward stripe pushes apart her dripping lips and teases her clit. Once, twice, thrice, he circles the prize; then he plunges into her, tongue unfurling inside her soft-sucking cunt. She jolts and bucks underneath him, squeaking when he curls up against the sensitive interior ridge just inside her pussy. He navigates this uncharted course by the pitch of her mewls and yelps.

The selkie’s head is swirling. His dark growls and snarls send her blood racing toward her center like hungry wee minnow fish. He grasps her hips in his strongly hands, she’s held down, catched by this land man like the selks of the auld tales. Now she kens why the sea queens would surrender.

“Do you like this?” he breathes, looking up from between her thighs. His ember-red hair is mussed, rakish; eyes gleam at her with the hungry fascination of an apex predator.

She seened power in him a’fore, when he’s working the docks and bossing the stupid potty smoke boys who rub shiny waxes on the boats. At the pier he’s a king, her mate. Regal, importantish smells waft off him when he’s fixing the problems. She scents nobility, not by blood, but by intellect and authority. This is who she wants to fuck, this is who she kens he will be alla’ times, once the mean man is gone.

“Aye, I like it verra muchly,” she bleats. “I need more o’ ye.”

“Well then.” He looms over her and unbuckles his belt. “Tell me what you need.”

“I need yer cock,” she pants, “I need ye to come inside me.”

His face darkens, raw and primal. He yanks off his confining human clothing. The buckle holding up his work pants clinks on the pebbly shore, then all sounds are swallowed by their grunts and gasps. 

He pushes between her thighs, knees furrowing the sand. Her wet lips part and open, the readiness of her snatch almost palpable on his tongue. Thumbs hook into the waistband of his Fruit of the Loom boxers and he drags them down, his thick cock is bared, slapping traitorously against his stomach.

A desperate bark pitches from her mouth to look at him. Her little clutch squeezes for his long, filling hardness. The selkie pushes herself onto her elbows and watches his mean, long hardness leak eagerly for her.

“Give me yersel’,” she demands.

It’s all he has, he thinks, —himself. But that feeling of throwing it all away seems as distant as the opposite coastline a hundred thousand miles away. Whatever had been pushed down, perhaps beaten down by his father, has awakened. He is alive, and life courses through his veins, wild and teaming. He can feel life straining in his balls, stirring his cock; it’s building with a force he couldn’t suppress if he wanted to.

As he holds himself, she guides him to her slick opening. The feeling of her eager folds around his tip makes him sigh like the quiet tide frothing on the shore beside them. She teases her slit with him and he cries open-mouthed, his eyes scrunched shut. It’s almost unbearably intense with her in control. She works his satiny head inside and adjusts to his thickness, sipping air between barely-parted lips.

He thinks she’s so pretty like this: eyebrows creased with focus, sweat gleaming on the juicy arches of her breasts, a gasp escaping those swollen lips as he pushes in further. Her claws dig into the shells and pebbles.

His human brain wants to ask her if it’s too much, or if perhaps he should go slower, but his mouth will only issue viril grunts and moans. At any rate, through her affirming squeaks, his animal brain registers her request for more. His hips begin to work fluidly, pistoning his thick, hard cock inside her. They start to frenzy.

“Ah, ye feel so… ung!”

“Jesus, —God! Fuck!”

It’s wild and sloppy; their flesh clashes like stormy waves on the shore. Her legs hitch up around his waist and he bends her back, searching for deeper purchase. The selk gasps when his cock fills her to the hilt; he’s not just longer, but thicker than she imagined. Her tight little hole protests his vigorous strokes but her viscera blossoms with impatience like the low buzz in her clit.

Releasing her hips, he clamps down on her plush thighs, spreading them, widening her further. She makes a sobbing sound that plunges from his heart straight down to his cock, his speed ratchets up to a 10. He’s pounding, ramming into her with abandon. The selkie devolves into lost whimpering.

“Please… ah, please…” she mewls, “Come fer me…”

He’s boiling with lust now watching her, so breathless, so desperate, caught on his cock.

“I need ye,  _ leannen dhomh _ , put a bairn in me…”

Pumping slows.  _ A what? _ He gives her a sidelong look. She can see his animal hindbrain fight with his human faculties.

The cogs in his head buckle and moan with this dissonance. 

On the one hand, this is insane. 

On the other, something woven into the fabric of him wants her, and perhaps has intuitively known her intent as soon as he scented her sweet desire. 

On one shoulder, his rationality ticks off on human fingers: first love, then marriage, then baby.

But swirling powerfully in his gut, pushing away all protest, is an instinct that’s demanding he shove her legs aside, drive himself into her and seed her like a great sea stallion.

His eyes go dark.

“Alright,” he thinks he responds. 

In reality, he simply growls. 

His voice is possessive, his vocal chords have flanges too, but they’ve never engaged until this moment. He loses himself in a rattling, gritty snarl and stirs his hips again. Her legs split wider, he churns into her deeper with claiming, possessing thrusts.

_ Yes, yes! _ She mews to herself.  _ Clever selk girl hass found hersel’ the bestest, most deliciousable mate! _ How easily she will catch pups off of him, she thinks, one after the other, as long as her coat stays safe on land.

He’s sawing air in and out between his teeth; his cock has never felt such a silky-textured vise and he doesn’t think he can last long.

She’s watching his sweetly face twist and gasp wi’ his big feelings, it makes her heart feel full like her pussy right now. He doesna ken it, but his body is emitting everything she needs to know about him, everything he will pass to his offspring. 

The selk smells that he is patient, verra plannish and calculate. She breathes in his fancy for measurings and lil scribble draw ideas fer things he makes wi’ his hands (whatever the fouk those be.) Endurance wafts off of him; lotta quiet brave, lotta doin’ the right thing. As he’s reaching the end of himself, she tastes the finale radiating off his skin. It’s his secret, she kens, but as he starts to come, it vapors from him whether he tries to hide it or no. The selk draws in a deep breath of his holiest virtue: compassion as big as an ocean.

They coalesce.

Long sighs, or howls to others who might have heard, echo across the water. He’s still thrusting, releasing himself into her and she’s keening like her face is melting away. The stream of stardust floods like a shining burst in their veins and then begins to fade. They slow.

He flops on top of her with an exhausted huff and her lips curl with satisfaction. She imagines his invisible, tiny salmon rushing with frantic haste upriver to her nesting grounds. A’course it doesna always happen the first time. Her body drifts in a lovely peace-haze and she wonders if it wouldna be prudentish to keep trying wi’ her bonny new mate. Just to be certainable.

Rolling aside, his arms scoop her from the pebbly shore and brush the angular shell bits and dried seaweed that are stuck to her skin. She roots up against him and purrs. It’s when the rumble begins in her chest that he realizes the first sound was coming from him. This sudden awareness brings him back to himself somewhat. His purring stops.

His sea animal nature is settling down and many thoughts rush into his brain like they’ve been waiting in line for his rationality to return. He swallows, looking down at the creature curled contentedly in his arms. 

How can he be both afraid of her and oddly fond of her at the same time?

“Shall I catch us summit to eat?” she offers sweetly, her feathery lashes folding and opening like dragonfly wings.

_ God, she doesn’t mean go to the fridge.  _ His insides recoil.

“Oh, I…” he fumbles.

“It isna trouble.” She leaps up and trots a yard away where her brilliant, glowing coat has been laid carefully over a piece of driftwood. Her arms slip into it like second skin; she pulls it up over her bare shoulders and the draping trail of it swishes around her ankles. She darts toward the water. As she moves, the coat takes on a shimmering light of its own, like phosphorescence.

“Wait!” He stands.

An enormous splash, and she’s gone. When he squints, he can just make out a grey-white flipper disappear into the frothy black water.

“Idiot!” he chides himself. 

Idiot for rowing out to sea at night. 

Idiot for fucking a stranger. 

Idiot for feeling so suddenly lonely, left standing here on the beach. 

But what did he expect, honestly? Some bizarre sea woman comes to him, demanding he knock her up. Did he really think she would stay for tea? She got what she came for. 

He searches for his boxers and pants, feeling ashamed. As he settles into the raw embarrassment of it all, he notices that he’s sort of disappointed. It’s impossible to tell what he expected of her, but he surprises himself with the admission that he hadn’t hoped she would go so soon.

Deep in his primal brain, a flare of assurance tells him that he’s not stupid to want her back. She’s his mate.

He shakes this thought off, struggling into his damp undergarments and work pants. 

The walk of shame is a few dozen yards back to the lighthouse cottage. He slips inside and bolts the door. The contrast of lights, wood heat and the bright colors of the sitting room feels blinding after the cool dark of night.

“Fuck,” he says to no one. 

He throws on a clean set of navy wool thermals and flips on the radio, puttering about the kitchen for some midnight tea. The crackling wood stove thaws his bones some, but he’s still staving off a foul mood. He hums absently with the  [ radio ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6ttOWHaRoo) .

_ Every now and then I get a little bit lonely _

_ And you're never coming 'round _

_ (Turn around) Every now and then I get a little bit tired _

_ Of listening to the sound of my tears _

The window above the kitchen sink makes a wet smacking sound and he drops the kettle with an undignified yelp.

Her face is pressed to the pane. A frightful, carnivorous grin spreads below her glass-squished pig nose. In each hand, a limp young coho smears greasily on his window.

His eyebrows shoot up and he tries to make his best scolding face, pointing at the door on the other side of the building.

“Go around,” he instructs.

He hears a snarl and she fades into the dark.

The handle of the front door rattles before he gets to the other side of the small house and he seriously wonders what kind of magic the sea woman possesses. When he opens the door she’s standing with her thick coat draped shruggingly around her naked form, presenting him with two gleaming fish.

“I gots supper.” 

She dumps the fish into his fumbling grasp and whisks past him into the house. The selk lets her coat slide to the ground as she parades around the cozy interior, surveying his dwelling. 

“Ye has a verra nice rookery, but I’m fair fashed to be smellin mean man around heres,” she says, frowning. She marches up to father’s easy chair and splays herself over the worn leather, wriggling and twisting like her damp, naked self will erase the offending odor. He wrinkles his nose.

When he places the fish onto a cutting board and selects a boning knife, he looks up to find her watching him. She’s wearing a soft look --for someone draped upside-down on a chair, anyway. Despite her long hair trailing down on the ground like one of those troll dolls, her lips twist, eyes heavy with an affection that he almost can’t bear. His gaze drops back to the coho, but his mouth twitches with a feeling curling in his stomach. The radio warbles.

_ And I need you now tonight _

_ And I need you more than ever _

_ And if you only hold me tight _

_ We'll be holding on forever _

_ And we'll only be making it right _

_ 'Cause we'll never be wrong _

_ Together we can take it to the end of the line _

_ Your love is like a shadow on me all of the time  _

_ I don't know what to do and I'm always in the dark _

_ We're living in a powder keg and giving off sparks _

_ I really need you tonight _

Bonnie Tyler’s unhinged, raspy wails tighten the bow-string tension in his chest. Asking her what all of this means might scare her off, he worries. But the longer he waits, the thinner his nerves are stretched.

He guts, scales, bones and filets the coho like the fishermen at the pier taught him. Glistening, rose-colored meat divides into neat rectangles. He twists on the burner and lights the gas, setting a cast iron skillet over the winking blue flame. A few cloves of garlic go into the pan with a comforting sizzle. 

A loud thump draws his attention from the skillet. When he turns around, she’s in the back bedroom, stuffing father’s clothes and bedding out the window. 

“Hey, don’t…!” He drops the spatula and scuttles across the house to her, the eggshell feeling washing over him again. She pauses with the quilt halfway out the drop sash window and looks at him with a fierceness that chills his blood. 

“He’s no good fer ye,  _ mo mhuir _ ,” she barks.

“He lives here!”

She regards him with disbelief.

“Mean man hurt ye!” The selk cups his marked cheek. “Ye oughtna give an inch to hurtish, bitey ones, and ye most certainly dinna rook wi’ em!”

“He’s my father,” he retorts. 

“No a good one!” she shoots back.

“I can’t just kick him out!”

“Never ye mind then.” She pats his cheek. “I’ll do it.”

The selk shoves the rest of the quilt out of the window and starts tossing sweaters into the night. He’s become a bit more in tune with her and can feel her hackles standing up like a sixth sense, but he thinks her attitude is too simplistic. Reality is far more complex between him and his father, the only caregiver in his waking memory.

“What happens when he gets back?” he says.

She stops throwing and pivots toward him. Her nose is inches from his, though she has to stand on her toes to get there.

“Mean man comes here,” she growls, “And I bites his nastible throat wi’ me teef and rip out his guts.”

He blinks.

“Very diplomatic,” he says dryly.

A terrible scorched smell hits his nostrils.

“Shit!” He rushes back to the kitchen and finds the garlic smoking in sorry little charred crumbles.

“Och, yer no puttin’ fire on our supper!” She’s by his elbow, hissing at the cast iron pan.

“Hey!” He swats her reaching claws. “Cooking is important for sanitation!”

Her glare is withering.

“I ken ye land folk like to ruin perfectful fishies wi’ yer fire and smoke, but I dinna care owermuch fer burnted food.”

He releases a long breath through his teeth and she smells his irritation.

“Yer bein rude, mate,” she sniffs. “I catched the fishies off the current —they’re no’ trash-eater, oil-dirty ones.”

“Oh.” He looks down at the fish. “Like, sashimi grade.”

She gurgles hungrily, sidling around him and plucking up one of the neat filets on the cutting board. With a satisfied slurp, she wolfs it down in one thick swallow.

Smacking her lips, her eyes widen when she’s met with a scowl.

“Disgusting.”

“...Eh?”

He picks up the cutting board and moves toward a round wooden cafe table posted in between the kitchen and sitting room.

“If you expect to be here with me, I can’t have you eating like that.”

His skin prickles with the words, the admission that he expects her to stay. It’s foreign, thrilling —totally terrifying, but he wears a stoic face. The selk doesn’t react to his declaration. His guts lurch;  _ does she even plan on staying? _

She mrrps quizzically while he selects cutlery and plates, setting them at the table. He pulls out one of the chairs for her.

“Sit down,” he commands, even parts firm and gentle.

Her eyes narrow defiantly, but she slinks to the chair and slides down like a haughty teenager.

His chair scapes the floor with a light squeak as he sits across from her.

“No… no, that won’t do,” he mutters, standing quickly. He feels like her pert brown nipples are staring at him.

Long-legged strides take him across the house to the smaller bedroom. He comes back with a blue ringer tee and pops it over her head before she can protest. She struggles and squawks until all her parts reappear and she stares down at the new garment. Her generous breasts fill out the top of his narrow shirt, but it’s length drapes discreetly over her thighs.

“That’s better.” He settles back into his chair. “Now do this…”

With his fork, he selects a piece of raw, fresh salmon and sets it in the center of his plate. His knife cuts several tidy triangles of fish and, with exaggerated affect, he picks up one small piece with his fork and brings it to his mouth.

“Like so.”

“Why fer ye eat so slow?” she scoffs. “Yer like a jellyfish takin days to gobble up one wee fish.”

“We’re meant to talk while we eat, I suppose.” He shrugs. “Catch up on the day… discuss the weather? Make plans for the weekend?”

Her snorting, growling rumble of disdain makes his lips quirk with amusement, but he’s a little worried she’ll decide she hates land customs and slip back into the sea. 

She does not seem entirely off-put, however. The selk focuses fiercely, she clutches the knife and fork with two fists and bludgeons the fish.

After several attempts, her fork comes away with a jagged chunk of salmon. She stuffs it in her mouth. An eye sneaks toward him, a tiny bid for his approval, even though she snootily sniffs and huffs through the whole thing.

“Not bad.” A smile curls in the corner of his mouth.  _ Maybe she does want to stay? _

“A’right then.” She waves her fork at him. “Tell me about yer weathers and weekends.” 

The selk takes a naughty shortcut, stabbing the whole filet at once with her fork and stealing a bite. 

He wants to ask her what they’re doing. What all of this means. His mouth opens, but the question dies on his tongue.

“Perhaps yer no so good wi’ catchup either?”

“I like you.” He finally spits it out with a rush of pent up feelings.

Her cheeks are full of salmon, but she beams.

“I like ye too.” She gulps, her sated smile reappearing. “I bein lookin ever so long fer a mate —and I found ye!”

“So…so you said, but...” He rubs his forehead. “I’ve never had a girlfriend, I’ve never had anyone really…”

She cocks her head.

“What I’m trying to say is…” he stammers, “I’m tired of being alone. I don’t understand why, but when I’m with you, I don’t feel out of place.” 

Her expression doesn’t change.

“Will you stay?”

She tips her head back. Her laugh is like sunrise shimmering on the crests of the water.

“A’course I’m stayin’  _ mo mhuir _ !” she burrs. “I’m yer mate! Selks mate fer life, ye ken that, aye?” Her face sobers and she dead pans, “If ye pupped me up and left me, I’d bite ou’ yer throat.”

“Well, we can’t have that.” He blushes, his insides jolting again at the mention of procreation. With a thick swallow, he tries to table this overwhelming notion in his mind. It’s head-spinning enough to contemplate the permanence of their novel partnership. These thoughts unravel the last of his energy; he pushes back from the table, rubbing his forehead with exhaustion.

“Och, yer spent, mate,” she observes.

“I suppose we’d ought to turn in.” 

He’s not really sure what he’s supposed to do at this point. Invite her to share his twin bed? Bring out some blankets for her to curl up with on the couch?

“Come on.” He stands and crosses the house; she follows dutifully. “This is my bedroom.” He pushes open the door and flips on the light.

The selk scampers toward the heady concentration of his deliciousable scent.

She stops short.

The room is sparse and militantly organized. A dresser is pushed against one wall and topped with nothing but a jar of loose change. In one corner, his bed is neatly made up: dressed with an ugly old floral quilt. His doorless closet has a modest assortment of wool flannel and heavy canvas for working the boatyard or maintaining the lighthouse. The only real personalization is a bookshelf packed with classic literature and a stack of cassettes next to his tape player on the nightstand: Foreigner, Scorpions, Def Leppard, R.E.M.

“Something wrong?”

“Nay… it's only... there’s lotta sad smells in heres.”

He nods silently.

She’s studying the colorful spines on his bookshelf when he switches the lamp on and climbs into bed. From his pillow, he can see the curves of her round, juicy ass cheeks peeking prettily from the hem of her tee shirt. His stomach floods with heat. Perhaps he would leave a different feeling lingering in this space from now on.

“What’s your name?” he asks. 

“Ye dinna say my proper name in humanspeak,” she says over her shoulder, her voice giving him the sense that it should be obvious.

“Oh.” He yawns.

She makes a series of chirrs and squeals and his eyes fly open wide.

“That’s what my kin call me by.” The selkie approaches his bed, nudges him to scoot over with her bare knee and then slips under the covers beside him.

“Not sure I can repeat that.” He gives her a wincing half-smile.

Their noses are inches apart, cramped by the small mattress and shared pillow. She laces her cushiony legs with his long, thin ones. His arm sneaks around her soft body, pulling her hips against his.

“Perhaps ye can choose summit fer me: a land name.”

“Hmmm.” He thinks.

“What about Anemone?” she suggests, pointing to a flower printed on his quilt. “Like this one?”

“That’s a rose, actually,” he corrects. “It’s a land plant, like a... flowering seaweed?”

“Rose…” she repeats thoughtfully. “A’right, I fancy it!”

“Very well.” The side of his mouth curls upward. He reaches around her and turns off the lamp.

Darkness washes over them, heightening the feeling of their tangled legs, her pillowy breasts against him, her silky hair under his fingertips.

“Goodnight, Rose,” he whispers.

“G’night,” she replies, burrowing her face into his chest.

His mind is still whirling with thoughts, but weariness drags his consciousness toward sleep like a lead weight.

_ I didn’t even know I wanted a mate,  _ he thinks. How strange and fickle is the sea, that he would throw himself into its watery depths, only to come ashore to a brand new life. 

This is only the beginning of the new things in store for him.

  
  



	3. Promise

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HEY! No beta this time.

_Awak' awak' ma fair pretty maid_  
_For oh how sound as thou dost sleep,_  
_I'll tell thee whaur yer bain's faither is_  
_He's lyin' close at your bed feet._

_I am a man upon the land,_  
_I am a silkie in the sea._  
_An when I'm far fae every strand_  
_Ma dwelling t'is in Sule Skerry._

_—The Grey Selchie of Sule Skerry,_ an Orkney fable adapted by Otto Andersen

  
  


His father doesn’t call for weeks.

When he does, he’s not happy.

“Fuckin lowlifes stole my engine,” his voice crackles over the phone. “Went right into the marina parking lot and jacked it from under the hood.”

“Why don’t you file an insurance claim?” He’s gotten bolder, he can tell. Probably has something to do with the selkie woman lounging in his bathtub. “Or you could replace it with the money you brought for the roofing.” 

“Don’t fucking patronize me.” Belligerence is the man's typical response.

A snarl curls on the son’s lips. “You gambled that money, didn’t you?”

“The fuck did you say to me?”

“Or drank it.”

“So you got a mouth on you now, huh?” his father rages. “You better send me the cash or I’ll break your mouth so it’s only good for suckin cocks!”

“Watch it!” he snaps. “I can’t send you that money.” He pauses. “I need it.”

“What could you possibly need that goddamn money for!”

“Gas bill’s coming up,” he lies. 

He can’t really explain the volumes of fish and chips he’s bought her down at Skippers (beer battered and fried turns out to be the only cooking she’ll tolerate.) Nor can he deny that he’s eaten into his savings getting her an endless supply of velvet yardage and silk scarves, all of which she has strung up in their bedroom so they can fuck in an undersea world of textured kelps and waterweeds. She’s fun and sexy in her own charming strangeness. He won’t withhold from her anything she asks.

“Unbe-fucking-lievable.”

“How do you expect me to carry on with the lighthouse if you’re off frittering away the operational funds? You left with Coast Guard money!”

“I don’t give a rat’s ass about the Coast Guard when my motherfucking pickup is stranded on the Elliot fuckin Bay! You’d better put that cash in an envelope and get it down to Rudy’s, Armitage, or I’m going to kick your ass into Canada!”

The line clicks, signalling the end of their confrontation.

He sighs, following the coiled wire back to its base and dropping the white plastic receiver into its cradle. A light splash and crinkling of water draws him to the bathroom.

Rose basks in the tub, a white cloud of bubbles surrounds her face, her breasts and belly like islands in the foam. His chest pools with warmth.

“What are you up to today?” He leans against the doorframe.

“I thinks I’ll swim to Orcas Island while yer at wee Gordon’s and get those clammies ye like.”

“Ah, you mean the clams you like.” His lips quirk.

She swirls around in the tub and wrinkles her nose at him. 

“I’ll eat ‘em the way I like, and ye’ll make yer grossish pa’sgetti and clams,” she sniffs.

He winces at the thought of stopping by the shop for ingredients, although her foraging has been a boon for their grocery bill. Maybe Gordon will give him some extra shifts this weekend. Sending that cash to father is really going to cramp their style, he sighs.

Rose’s legs scissor kick the bath water in churning currents. Has she used some new soap? She smells temptingly nice, he thinks. 

Desire quickens his pulse. 

The sea monster in him begins to pilot his predatory movements. He bends over the tub and dips his hand into the hot, swishing water, tracing up the length of her naked thigh.

“Yer working soon?” she purrs, shivering. 

“Hang work.” 

He unbuckles the straps of his yellow waders and drops them with his pants and drawers around his ankles. With his thumbs digging out of his wool socks and his hand haphazardly loosening buttons, he is naked in moments. Rose lets out a small squeal as he leaps over the side of the tub with a splash.

With a dark, hungry little smirk, he lowers himself over the length of her naked body, kissing her neck. She gasps softly as his lips mark the sensitive skin.

The heat of the water swirls through Rose as he shoves her back against the bathtub. The cast iron of the tub is oddly cool where her shoulders and ass cheeks are pressed against it, held down by his searching, yearning weight. 

He’s unsettleish, she smells. Nervousable. His brow wrinkled in the middle of his prettyful face when he thinks she isna looking. He’s verra worrit. 

“Sweet shinyhouse boy,” she croons. “Yer a’right then?”

“Mhmm,” he replies absently, sucking and kissing at her neck. His chest reverberates against her sensitive nipples.

She reaches up and runs her hands over the smoothly planes of his body; each surface a new, deliciousable texture underwater: the healed sad scars, the sculpted wee divot where his arse meets his waist, the silkish curve of his bonny cheeks.

The water is still hot enough to steam slightly as their limbs tangle together. Rose watches her lover’s pale cheeks flush with heat as he marks her glowing brown skin with little pink love bites. He kens her so well now: coaxing her surfaces to the edge, navigating her arousal. His hands trace her breasts, thumbs whorl over her nipples, now perilously sensitized by the heat of the water; she shudders and bucks underneath him: her chosen captor, her mate.

He slips his hand between her legs and strokes her piqued little clit with two fingers, letting a sly smile play at the corner of his mouth. Her slippery slick seeps out of her pussy into the water, drawn out by his swirling fingertips. Her breath quickens, marking the surface with steady ripples as his pace increases. Her pressure builds, she lets out an unwilling squeak.

“I like that sound.” He lights up.

“I canna help it,” she pants, her eyes popping open.

“I said I like it.” His gravelly laugh echoes off the tiled surface of the bathroom.

He reaches up and grabs both sides of the tub, drifting the lower half of his body down between her legs and slides home with one firm motion. Breaths hiss, soft gasps fill the room. With the heat and weightlessness of the water, she can barely feel him floating above her, but she senses his thick, intimate presence deep inside as gentle splashes rise up between them. He drives himself deeper and she cries out; it’s if he's seeking to anchor himself inside her body. She won’t tell him now, but the way he dominates her in the water is exactly how the selks prefer to make love.

The wavelets around his body increase their volume and his voice reverberates way down in his chest. His cock rams her, batters her, reaches the deepest part of her again and again, aching to be united with her flesh. She begins to simmer up to overflowing. Hot blood surges from the center of her stomach down to the ends of her rubbery, boiled limbs as she melts around him. His whole frame tenses up in ecstasy, jerkily finishing with several final hot, jetting surges into her waiting clutch.

He lets go of the tub’s rim, sinking down next to her so that the water is drawn up over them like the toasty covers of a bed. She strokes his shoulders. He brushes a wisp of damp, raven hair from her eyes.

She wants to tell him now. 

Wi’ his seafoam eyes so softly fer her; their bodies pressed together like two clam shells around a precious pearl. 

Instead she bites her tongue. Calm issues from his pores in the wake of his release, but she can still detect the bitter tang of his concern. And guilt perhaps? _What would dearest shinyhouse boy have to feel guilty about?_ Her stomach knots and tangles.

“I suppose I’d better be off then.” He gives her a long look down through his damp scruff of fiery hair.

“So pretty ye are, so contentable here, wi’ me…” Rose skims his hairline with the tips of her claws. His eyes close. “I like yer lyelashes when yer eyes are shut.” Her lips whisper over the ridge of his cheekbone where the copper lashes fan against his face.

“You’re making it impossible for me to go, Rose,” he rumbles. “Gordon will be waiting.”

“Suit yersel’,” she huffs through a sad little smile.

He rises from the tub, water sluicing off his opal planes. Her eyes peep over the rim of the tub, watching him dry. He’s turned toward the sink, toweling his wiry form: a prototype of lithe, graceful architecture carved out of iridescent abalone, so masculine and yet beautiful, rare. He dresses again for work.

“Hurry back fer supper.”

He grunts a response. “I’ll try not to be late, Gordon has a rather big motor rebuild on a Chris Craft flybridge.” 

Her lips twist. 

He’s not telling her that they really need the overtime. In his pocket is an envelope full of cash, addressed to Rudy’s.

“Dinna get caught up in fly-bridgies too long, _mo mhuir_ ,” she calls to him as he heads toward the door. 

He stops, his grip lingering on the handle.

“I ha’ summit fer ye. Special, like.”

He softens.

“Alright. See you this evening.”

“See ye,” Rose parrots back. She sinks below the surface of the bath and blows bubbles in the water.

The front door shuts. The jab in her heart returns. _Why is he sad?_

Her limbs float, lax and aimless like the tiny form swimming in her belly.

 _Maybe he doesna wan’t it,_ she worries.

She hides these thoughts and sends calm, sweet whistles and chirps through the water to her small one. 

+++

The cash burns in his pocket all day.

He’d decided, with a small sigh of relief, that he was too late already to drop the envelope in the mail before work. Better to post it during his midmorning break.

Which would have worked out fine, had he had actually taken a midmorning break. 

Ever.

By lunchtime he’s worked up the obligation to march through the boat yard, cross the street and stand over the blue, round-topped box. Hesitations ensue.

His hand is hovering over the slot, the envelope fat with money. 

Money that his father will only waste on booze and black jack.

Money that they’ll need for a baby.

His heart pitches and reels with the very thought. It’s not that he’s entirely reconciled to the idea; it still frightens him to no end that Rose would propose this untoward notion so quickly, selkie culture or not. Even more terrifying to him is the idea of becoming a parent. Was it really prudent for someone who had been fathered so poorly to jump into raising a child? It doesn’t add up to him.

Not like he’s doing any math while they’re fucking each other’s brains out. He muses fondly on their liaison in the tub. They’ve coupled more days than they haven’t, he notices smugly.

 _All the more reason to hang onto that money,_ he considers, anxiety prickling at him. 

Then, a wave of sick guilt hits him. 

She’s in danger, he knows. Just by being with him, he’s put her in the path of a vile monster.

Any minute that despicable bastard could return, and then what? Perhaps it would be better to pay him off, keep him at bay a little longer. Of course he won’t purchase a new engine, this money will let him circle the pubs —perhaps until he dies of alcohol poisoning or fatally chokes on his own vomit. Something pleasant like that.

He nearly drops the envelope into the chute.

Something stops him.

In his mind’s eye, he can see his primal will standing against his executive faculties, holding his grip in place, not letting go. His own wild subconscious rears up from the depths and won’t let him capitulate to that nastible shithead. A throttling, raging growl grinds against his sternum.

“Fuck you, Brendol!” he barks.

An coiffed woman walking her dog startles and gives him a hostile glare.

He coughs and shoves the envelope into his coveralls, walking briskly back to the shipyard.

 _Later_ , he tells himself. If he changes his mind, he can always stop by the post office before five.

+++

Rose wanders the big shiny store, lost. 

_S’nothing._ She snarls to herself. _Wee noodlies is probly on the next row._

Kimsey Grocery is not the very biggest food store she’s been in wi’ her mate. They went to Bellingham last weekend and she gots lovely new tenny-runners in the biggest, giantest store wi’, like, a hundred tiny stores inside. It was verra white in there, wi’ eye-hurty lights and she had to get outta there after awhile.

Her bright new tennies look so verra nice wi’ her turquoise sparkly stirrup pants, her mate’s black tee draped off one shoulder and a silk scarf tied so fashionish around her waist. Her shining dark hair has that natural sea salt _va-voom_ : it’s caught up a pony wi’ the most prettyful sequin scrunchy. Least she looks supa _funky fresh_ while bein supa lost lost lost.

Eyes dart about the aisles. Cans. Was dere cans in pas’getti n clammies?

 _No no,_ she hisses. _Noodlies, cheeses, wee greenie bits (dinna ken what,) papery smelly garlics, and_ … ah fouk, what was it? 

She pauses and chews on the handle of her plastic purse. 

This is much less difficulter when her mate is wi’ her. He kens just how to move through this world like she swims and glides through hers. Rose loves just wandering with him, going nowhere or anywhere. Getting on the big bus to new towns, wandering the beach, experiencing the colors, tastes and feelings of a place she’s never had a reason to 'splore before. He’s her reason, she thinks. Her heart does a double squeezy squeeze.

She wants to please him. Make him feel happy when he comes back to the shinyhouse. Mayhaps he wilna be so worrit if he kens she can cook. 

Is this where the cheesies are?

Rose stares at a backlit refrigerated case stacked with cold items, their labels featuring images that are infuriatingly unhelpful. 

“Alla these stupid kackages ha’ wee cows on them! Fouk!”

A terrible thought jabs her mind. How will she be a good mam to land babies if she canna get supper from the market? Nausea curdles in her stomach, the cow images and labels gloss and blur in her vision.

“Can I help you?”

Rose spins around and faces a middle aged woman with big, frizzy hair styled in a smalltown adaptation á la Julia Roberts. The grocery lady smiles with her mouth but her eyes rake the selkie up and down with barely-veiled disdain. _Bitch_. Rose smooths her hackles with a deep breath and looks down at the grocer with the cool, steely eyes of a magical sea queen. She blows the woman off.

“Nay,” she snorts. “I’ll find the wee noodlies mysel’.”

“Aisle seven.” Grocery bitch’s overly plucked eyebrows shoot up.

“I sayed, I’m fine.” Rose bristles.

“You’ve been circling the store for twenty minutes.”

“I finds my things wi’out yer help, lady.” A growl prickles in her chest, threatening to become audible.

“I’m inclined to suspect you’re shoplifting. Hmm?”

Rose’s lips curl. _Who does dis big hair bitch think she is?_ She sucks in a scentsy breath to find out and chokes. Dumb crazy-hair girl sprayed hersel’ wi’ that nastible, ‘sgusting stink spritz. 

_Oh no._

Bile lurches in Rose’s stomach, a sick wave rolls up her throat.

“Dear Lord in heaven!” The grocer jumps back as Rose ralphs up a whole halibut’s worth onto the linoleum floor.

The perpetually adolescent-looking man behind one of the checkout counters stands frozen, watching from several yards away. He lifts the receiver of the PA system to his mouth, clicking it on with a sharp squeal. “ _Clean up on aisle twelve_.”

Rose is half doubled over, her hands on her knees, cheeks stained with exertion. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and rises slowly —regally. Grocery bitch is still cemented in place, a look of shock plastered on her face. Rose regards her with indifference, the meager peasant bitch. Unworthy mortal.

“I need ye to get me some things,” she orders. “First, show me alla stuff ye have fer wee babies.”

+++

He throws a leg over his bike and checks his watch again.

4:45.

There’s still time to do it today. The oppressive weight of the envelope in his pocket makes him jittery.

The streets of the little port town bustle with tourists, he kicks off the curb and leaves the boatyard behind. His six speed bicycle swoops around a curve in the road and dodges a group of noisy winos clustering to get their picture with the view of Mt. Baker. A group of seagulls flap away, bleating as he whizzes past. 

He plugs up the hill. 4:50.

“Shit!” He grits his teeth and pedals harder, 

This needs to be done today, to get it off his chest. The decisiveness of it thrills him a little. It means he knows what he wants. He’s ready.

He pulls up to the building and lets his held breath whoosh out of his lips. His guts untangle with relief. They’re still open.

His lips perk. Briskly, he pushes the door open and steps inside.

+++

_It isna susposed to boily roil that much, aye?_ She frowns. The pot is frothing, seething angrily and the noodles inside flail like a bed of seaweed during a hurricane.

Her face is dewy from peering again and again into the steaming pot; perspiration clings to the back of her neck and a dainty curl of hair plastered to her forehead. 

The windows of the kitchen are steamed up. Every single item from the drawers and cabinets is strewn about the countertops.

Rose worries the edge of her lip. Does she put the clams in now? When does the cheesies go on?

She huffs a frustrated little snork and opens the refridgurger. The satisfying little tug, blinky light and burst of refreshy cool always soothes her. Several dozen pretty clammies perch pertly on a plate just inside. She sneeches one and pops it open wi’ her wee claws.

Tossing it back, the buttery, silky texture hits her mouth first, followed by a flavorful splash of saltwater. It’s like a shot of fatty, savory decadence —pure bliss. Rose eyeballs the plate, her stomach gurgles.

“No,” she restrains hersel’. “Hafta save them fer him.” She kens it’s no easy bein wi’ a selkie girl, but they’re a family now. Och, Poseidon, how her chest bursts wi’ that thought. _I hafta do it right_ , she hisses. _Gotta make e’rything nice and perfectable to be a good mate fer him_ _and a good mam fer his bairn._

The fridge door slams and she surveys the table. Plates. Cuttery. Aye. Nappykins. Good. She’s seened ginormous, prettyful flower bunchies at the tables when they eat out (though she doesna like resta-rant food owermuch.) 

Rose snatches her glossy selk coat from one of the pegs by the door and scampers down to the shoreline. She dives into the glittering water and selects the most beautiful stems of graceful, curling waterweed. It doesna look the same when she’s standing at the table, tucking the limp, sad wrinkles of seaweed into a cup for a vase. She growls and abandons it.

The pot is still burbling. She switches the burner off. Cheesie time now? The block of parmesan plops into the hot noodle water and sinks to the bottom. Summit doesna look right.

 _A’course!_ She squeals, scrambling about for the colander. The noodlies gotta come outta the water.

Rose stands with the pot over the sink; she holds the pot just like he showed her, wi’ the wee potholdies. She tips its steaming mouth toward the colander and things go badly from there. Water and noodles rush everywhere, filling the sink with flaccid, overboiled pasta and splashing scalding hot water onto her bare feet.

She howls. The pot clanks and bowls loudly across the kitchen floor and the sink steams with her defeat.

The front door opens.

He sets down his lunch cooler and slicker gear. His face hollowed by a stressful day but his eyes wide, taking in the catastrophic scene. 

The kitchen has been utterly inverted. Every surface is covered with things that do not belong there. The table is set with three spoons at each place and there’s a heap of smelly seaweed in the middle. The sink billows with steam, bleached noodles cover a six foot radius. 

In the middle of disaster, Rose huddles in a pool of hot noodle water, clutching her toes and whimpering. Two wet tracks make their way down her ruddy cheeks. She looks up, finds his eyes and falls apart.

“Ah, my poor darling girl, what happened?” He sinks beside her on the floor.

“I burnted my toeses,” she sniffs. “And the grocer lady wasna verra nice to me.”

“You went to Kimsey’s yourself?” Arms circle her, his thumbs wipe her damp cheeks.

“I dinna ken how to make yer wee pas’getti and clams.” The tears spill again. “All the noodles are fouked.”

“Oh no.” His face is the picture of sympathy, but his eyes betray a glint of humor. “And you went to all the trouble.”

“It was susposed to be nice fer ye,” she cries, “Special, to tell ye ‘bout the baby.”

His heart rams into his rib cage.

“Oh Rose,” he melts. His grip around her tightens, he steadies his sweet little sweaty, achy, hormonal mess.

Her senses are flooded with the diffusion of his surprise and happiness; saturating it all is the overpowering savor of love: so strong and sweet, it makes her eyes sting.

“Ye were so worrit earlier, I telled mysel’ you didna want it,” she admits through the crumbling pieces of the tough exterior she’s worn all day.

“No, no.” 

He pauses, controlling the catch in his voice. Seafoam eyes glaze with a hundred thoughts. 

“Are ye angry?” she asks, even though she would know if he was.

His pulse hammers in his ears for a few moments as a roar of fear surges, crests and then recedes. He looks at his feelings and sees something reflecting under the surface of his panic: love. He loves that tiny spark, as fragile and unbound to the earth as it still may be. Knowing the world as he does, it's difficult not to feel a bit of dread imagining such a tender piece of his heart opening soft little eyes to the coldness of reality. 

“Look at me, sweet one.” Their arms untangle and he holds her face, his fingertips tracing the edges of her cheeks. “I’m happy.”

“Yer scairt.” Her eyes go glassy.

“Yes.” His face curves into a lopsided smile. “Scared and happy.”

“Ye want it, then?” she breathes.

He sucks in a breath.

“I opened a savings account. For us. For a baby.”

Her eyebrows crease with confusion.

“There was a good sum of money I’d put away from working at Gordon’s and my father asked for it,” he explains. “He made me upset and angry.”

He hushes Rose’s hiss with big hands squeezing her shoulders.

“I put the money in the bank where he can’t touch it.” His face is earnest, assuring. “Rose, I’m already certain that I want a family with you.”

“Ye were verra clever and plannish,” she muses, “And ye didna ken about the bairn? Truly?”

He shakes his head.

“I love you,” he says.

Her hum echos off the kitchen surfaces. His words splash into her body like warm syrup, trickling down cozily through her veins with new meaning. He has told her he loves her many times with his lips and his cock, and now he’s planted his love inside her —the oldest declaration in the animal kingdom.

“I love ye,” she whispers. Rose flushes, she drinks in the intricate bouquet seeping from his skin: pensive hope, bashful wonder. Feelings he doesn’t have words for. 

When his hand, still a little chilled from gripping bike handles, slides feather-shy under the hem of her shirt, she shivers. Slowly, as if he thinks it’s not allowed, he slips into the high waist of her leggings, settling his palm over her lower belly. Warm, soft skin meets his cool hand, thawing his hesitation. Copper lashes flutter, beating back the emotion pricking his eyes.

They’re suspended there for an unmeasurable moment. Her breaths fill and shallow under his hand; his cheeks burn thinking about how she’ll change like the waxing moon.

“Come with me.” He gets up and takes her hands, hauling her to her feet. They leave behind the puddle on the floor, the splatters of noodles and the piles of loose kitchen accoutrements. 

Outside, the sun has fallen behind the distant shoreline across the bay. Moonlight swaths the beach with silver-blue tones: bright, but mysterious.

The cold, damp air brisks against the hot creases where her limbs were folded together on the kitchen floor; she realizes her body is burning to have his hands all over her. Her blood pulses with arousal: the hormone cocktail produced by their success seems fraught with the impulse to breed him again. _I want to feel ye inside me._ Her cunt gulps.

He leads her by one hand, their steps clanging on the iron staircase winding up the spire of the lighthouse. Their ascent reaches a wide, square deck at the tower’s peak: the lookout. Just above them is the lamp, which he keeps in perfect order. It swivels in a lazy circle, casting its long, reaching beam over their heads and across the bay like a placid eye. The motor thrums tranquilly inside the steepled service room; a little squeak in the clockworks catches his ear but he turns his focus to Rose.

She didn’t see him grab the thick wool blanket from the couch; he spreads it on the narrow walkway of the lookout’s balcony.

“Sit with me.” His face is touched by moonlight, pearly and pale. The rareness of her mate has never felt more heart-skipping to her. _How perfect and careable he is, always seein’ what we need a step a’fore, always thinking o’ what he can pro’wide fer us._

He holds out the blanket to her and she curls against him; her plush body melting into the space between his arms. They settle back against the sloping column of the lighthouse. Damp, icy wind brushes their faces, coaxing them to huddle closer —though the chill is not really a bother for sea folk. 

He can see faint puffs of condensation from her nose and parted lips. They listen to the whooshing of the shore and watch the moon’s light refract across the turbulent bay like glittering diamonds. 

His arm slides around behind her and rests on her belly: sheltering. She sinks deeper into him in silent response.

“I love holding ye close to my heart,” she sighs, slipping her hand over his.

He leaves a delicate kiss on her eyebrow: so gentle, like she’s glass. _Sweet, darling angel._ He wants to keep her encircled like this in his arms. Safe from anything that might hurt her. _Them._ His heart thuds against his ribs. His grip around her waist anchors her to him like she’ll break if he lets go.

But her body isn’t the delicate vessel he imagines. She thrums against him, vibrating with energy deeper and stronger than the lantern motor rattling the panel against his back. Her eyes are twin coals, smoldering with desire. The selkie grinds her hip against his work pants, the corners of her mouth in a teasing curve. She’s making his cock twitch.

“Ye wilna hurt me.” Rose burrs, as if reading his mind. Perhaps she isn’t so fragile, he thinks. After all, a woman’s power to bridge worlds is both ancient and common. Maybe he won’t break her. 

“You want me, little selkie?” He threads his fingers into the back of her hair.

“Aye,” she purrs.

His fist knots the hair at the base of her skull and draws her in so she’s flush against him. He pulls her possessively toward his lips. She relents, opens; her mouth parts for his searching tongue. He rushes into her like he can take her and hide her away. Consuming, inhaling her sweet mews and squeaks. She is all give and yield against his hard planes: her contours cushiony, her breasts infinitely generous. He takes her, all of her; his kisses are raw and selfish. They’re driving her wild.

Her hands ball with knitted chunks of his aran sweater. She wiggles and lurches against his confining grasp, breaking free of his arms and shoving him against the lighthouse. His eyes flash with her overt defiance, but she doesn’t push him away, she moves him where she can reach his belt buckle.

“Puir shinyhouse boy,” she simmers. “Ye werk so hard keepin’ things well.”

His chest reverberates as she unthreads his leather belt and unzips his fly. His cock tents his boxers, twitching and straining when she takes it in her warm little hands. 

“I want to love ye, and feel ye in my body,” she says. He throbs against her grip, leaking humiliatingly on her. She disappears into the folds of the blanket and laps at his tip with tiny coquettish licks. He tastes salty and a little musky and a wee bit like her soap from the bath this morning. Her lips close around his cock, sliding up and down his length with luxurious swirls of her tongue.

His head tips back against the wall with an unhinged groan. _As if she didn’t already give me enough cardiac arrest for one day…_ He chokes out another strangled sound. She’s his wild beast, his _banféinní_ , his warrior woman. 

The selkie swallows his cock, the walls of her throat squeezing around him with such exquisite force; his back arches, his features twist with a heart-rending “mmng... —ah!”

Rose smiles around her mate’s thick, deliciousable dick. How easily she unwinds him like a spool, just by loving — _worshiping_ his perfectful surfaces, from his softly round velvet tip, to the pulsing veins that lace down his length, to the thin, copper-tufted skin of his sac. Her sucking lips, lashing tongue and taking throat say so much more than speech. _I love ye, I love ye, I love ye,_ she tells him over and over.

She wants to draw him in more, to feel him deep and sure, near to her heart. Her eyes sting wi’ him so far down her throat; she’s watching him —so chest-hurtishly pretty he is. He pants, lips swollen and glossy wi’ her kisses. Through hooded slits, he watches her with a reverence so much deeper than just lust. _He adores me,_ she kens. Feelings splash from her eyes. She swallows him again.

“Ung… easy!” His breath is huffing through curved lips, he rakes a hand through his salt-tousled orange hair. “I won’t last long like that!”

Rose pulls her lips away from him.

“I’m so wet fer ye,” she mews through shaky, damp lips.

“Darling girl,” he breathes.

“I’ve ruined my sparkly leggins.” She peers down at her stirrup pants.

He darkens.

“Let me see.” 

Slowly, she slides her knees out from underneath her and rocks her hips back, spreading her legs apart. She lifts the hem of her black shirt up and reveals a large, soaking stain seeping through the inside of her sparkly leggings. 

“Well done,” he smirks. 

“Take them off?” She bats her lashes at him.

His pupils look like deep water, blown out and black on his hungry, snarling face. The flanges in his vocal chords rumble with the effort it takes for him to slide her pants down without ripping them apart and plunging himself into her with one motion.

“Lay down, selkie,” he tells her, his voice heavy, dripping with obsession.

Rose bends back, unfurling, opening. He pushes her shirt up above her hips and eases her legs apart. Her glistening pink petals peel and open, her pooling little clutch winks, begging.

The selkie’s sweet cake smell hits him and his animal hindbrain clicks: he did notice she was different this morning. Now, with her pheromones drenching the evening air around him, he can read it, _his baby_ , written in her body’s code like it was stamped in big bold letters. 

His latent wildness blinks on like a thousand watt bulb, his human faculties black out.

“Ah, fouk!” she yowls. 

He’s holding her hips down against the wood planks of the lookout deck, nose buried in her thatch of shining hair, his tongue laving her needy cunt with starving frenzy for more of that intoxicating scent. 

She clenches around his tongue, gushing unwillingly into his mouth. It’s enough to make her pussy pulse and wring; she can feel her heart throbbing in her clit. A growl of frustration escapes her. _Enough of that, gi’ me yer cock._

It’s like liquor, her slick; he tastes himself there buried in her and it makes his blood blaze like magma. She needs more. More of him. Two claws latch onto her calves and haul her legs over his shoulders. He bends her in half, spearing her pussy on his cock.

She keens.

He’s so deep at this angle, acutely filling. She’s sucking at him; dragging him back when he slides in and out like the tide. He’s hers, her foreverly mate, she has him and she won’t let go. Her cunt stretches around his mean length, giving in to the precarious depth as he pierces her heart with his cock.

 _Mine_. He fixates on the limited words he can find. _My selkie. My baby. My wife. Mine._

His hips beat against her, pushing so far inside: taking and using what’s his. The selk spasms around him; her mewls turning to wails, her head filling with glittering stars that fizzle all the way down to the tips of her fingers. Her mate jerks and judders, his grip around her legs going white as he seethes through gritted teeth. He tips his head back and a long heartbreaking moan opens up from him, echoing across the water. 

Rose is a loose, wobbly puddle on the deck of the lookout. She smiles weakly up at her mate, panting. 

He sets her legs down tenderly, still chuffing like a wild animal, though his face has gone soft. Utterly spent, he collapses beside her.

“Yer so good to me,” she says shakily.

Their hands lace together.

“Perfect, darling girl,” he murmurs.

There’s a dull ringing sound coming from inside the cottage and his insides jolt. For a split second he’s worried the Coast Guard are calling in, having heard him cum like a feral wolf a moment ago. _Of course not._

“I suppose I’d better get that.” He drags himself begrudgingly off the deck. “Wait right here, I’ll be back.”

She hears his steps recess down the metal stairs. The stars blink down at her, barely visible in the brilliant moonlight. Her hands smooth down the wrinkled front of her shirt and linger over her baby.

“Ye see, wee one, he loves us,” she says softly. “And we’re goin’ to be together verra soon.”

A big splash makes her sit up. She peers over the edge of the lookout and sees five round seal heads bobbing in the water a little ways off shore. It’s too far to see their eyes but she can feel them staring back at her.

 _Weel they’re back a ways early, those wee beasties._ Her lips pinch with an affectionate scowl. _They’d ha’ better done what I sayed or I’m gonna be fair fashed._

The steps return, flying excitedly up the stairs. There’s a lightness to them that makes her heart bouey. 

_Ah, they came through after all…_ she glances back at the water but the seals are gone.

“Rose!” Her mate reappears beside her. His face is serious but the edges of him have a youthful, almost boyish freedom that makes her heart squeeze. 

“What is it?” She pretends like she doesna ken.

“That was the King County Sheriff's office, they have my father booked —indefinitely!” he says, eyes lighting up.

“He got catched by the polices?”

“Drug and illegal firearm possession, apparently.” He rubs the back of his head, his brows pinching together. Drugs were a new low for Brendol, he supposed.

“They’ll keep him a long long time, then?” she asks hopefully.

“I doubt anyone will post bail, and the charges sound serious.”

His heart races, he takes her hand.

“Rose.” He smiles. “We’re free.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaah tell me what you think y’all!
> 
> ONE last chapter to go, I got too long and had to split em up, haha!
> 
> Kimsey Grocery is the original grocery store in Anacortes, but I'm not actually sure if it still existed by the time the 80s rolled around. I do know that after the dot com boom in the 90s, bigger stores moved to the area.
> 
> Here is a detailed description of lighthouse workings and parts: https://uslhs.org/lantern
> 
> Funny note: I considered speeding up the timeline so I looked at seal gestational periods… uuuh yeah, the average seal gestation is 11 months! WHAT!


	4. Echo

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you friends for following along with this story to its conclusion. I have posted the full finale but I broke it into two chapters (so don't panic if you get to the bottom of the page and the story isn't over yet!!)
> 
> I want to start right off the bat saying this story DOES have a Happily Ever After, despite a major character separation. So bear that in mind. Also, check out those tags. We get dark and twisty here for a sec. The kink also really ramps up so if you're squicky about pregnancy/breeding kink best turn to back now. 
> 
> Finally, a HUGE thanks to my dear Fir [ @Sermocinare](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sermocinare/works) for being a beta genius and polishing this finale!
> 
> Trigger Warning: Breeding/pregnancy kink, D/S, gun violence, hostage situation, crashing a vehicle into water, graphic gore and blood, major character separation, (but a guaranteed HEA, I swear!)

_“Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary?”_

― Herman Melville, _Moby Dick_ (1851)

Months pass. The summer brings lushness and green to the coastal lands among the pines. Endless flowers: lupine, blue-eyed mary, checker lily and sea blush sprout in the meadows by the shore, just as their baby takes root and blossoms. The warm beach days and lazy nights are as blissful as any couple might feel watching their love grow and take shape before their eyes.

By June it’s no secret, by July she won’t fit into his shirts, and by August her belly looks like a luminous moon framed in her red polka dot bikini. He steals glances when he thinks she’s not looking, his heart squeezing to see her full with his child. Lounging with her giant sunglasses, floppy hat and a trashy magazine, her seal nature is still undeniably manifest: perhaps more so with her roundness draped luxuriously over the sand.

“Who is dis big hair girl?” Rose frowns at an image of Madonna pouncing cat-like across the glossy centerfold. 

He looks up from the yellowed pages of his Hemmingway; his eyes shaded under a pair of flattering aviators.

“I have no idea,” he responds.

“Och, wouldna wanna scrap wi’ her,” Rose tsks at the page, pulling the magazine closer to examine the celebrity’s shoes.

“I hope you’re not doing much of that while you’re off-shore during the day,” he says, not taking his eyes off _The Old Man and the Sea._

“Eh?”

“Scrapping. Fighting.” He removes his sunglasses so she can see his stern expression.

“I dinna let bitchy harbor seals steal my fishies.”

“Not.” He closes his book with a slap. “Acceptable.”

“It’s differentable wi’ my coat, _mo mhuir_. The softly parts dinna stick out so.” She runs her hand over her pronounced swell for effect. “I’m all packed up. Ye never seened a bumpy seal, aye?”

“What’s this then, hmm?” He catches her wrist and twists her arm over to reveal a long series of ugly red scratches. “Were you going to tell me about this?”

“S’nothing.” She waves a hand dismissively. “I was picking off a school o’ halibuts that… may ha’ been in sea lion territory…”

“Sea lions!” His features tense.

“Dinna fash yeresel’, I’m much faster than a dumpy auld sea lion!”

He sits up, looming over her, blotting out the sun so she has to tip her enormous sunglasses down to see his face.

“You’re done hunting.”

Rose scoffs, her eyes flashing with anger. 

“If I canna hunt, I canna eat.”

“I’ll buy you all the fish and prawns and clams and oysters you could ever want,” he grates. “But no hunting, and for Christ’s sake no sea lions, is that understood?”

Her throat starts to vibrate.

“I’m a selkie, and selkies need to chase, to hunt!” She props herself on one hand, struggling to get up.

“Well you’re my mate now.” He leans over her, imperious and high-handed. “And you’re carrying my child. So you’ll do as I say.”

Her pupils dilate, a snarl curves on her lips but she purrs with arousal. The way he smells when he’s protectly and seriousable… it makes her pussy squelch. 

“And what will ye do if I take my wee coat and go catch ten fishies right now?”

Rose is leaning back on her elbows, her eyes dark, her lips curled with defiance. He plants a hand in the sand on the other side of her ripening little body and lets his head hang down from his shoulders. Their noses are inches apart.

“I’ll pin you down before you can get to your coat, like the terrible fishermen in the old legends,” he says with quiet menace, “And then I’ll fuck you until you’re speaking in the ancient faerie languages.”

Her inhale is like a long, winding spool: slow and heavy. 

He kisses her neck; marking, claiming like his nips and love bites will persuade her to do what he says. He’s her sea king: he’s everything she knew he was when she first scented him: commanding, powerful, infinitely nurturing.

Hat and glasses pitch off into the sand. He loses his fingers in her hair and tugs a fistful; she groans with the pleasant tension. She’s not good at getting up off the ground anymore and he knows it. He pushes her shoulders back so she’s flat and at his mercy. 

“What if ye make me sad and miss the sea? Shall I run away?” she provokes him.

“Never, Selkie,” he rasps, riding a jealous hand up the slope of her growing belly. “You’ll be too busy having my babies, and keeping them in our seaside cottage.” She arches her back prettily beneath his possessive touch.

“Darling wee devils never let me do anything!” 

“It’s puzzles and animal crackers and Sesame Street for you, my dear. No more sea lions or orcas to fight off when you’re tucked away safe in my house,” he bends toward her face, lips closing around hers.

His hand sneaks down and unties the little bows holding up her bikini bottoms. Her breaths double when the cool, coastal breeze whispers against her glistening, pink lips —her traitorous pussy so wet for him already. His fingers follow close behind, trailing up and down her slit, finding a rhythm.

“But then no more big waves and surf spray and tide pools!” she whines into his mouth.

The gravelly laugh reverberates low in his sternum. 

“Shall I lock you in a golden mansion, with perfect shiny things and all the silk you want?”

He’s circling, darting, revving her clit like an outboard motor. The heat in her pelvis churns and froths. 

“No!” she gasps. Desire floods to her squeezing snatch; it seeps out hot and slippery, coating the inside of her thighs. Her hips struggle and buck against him.

“What if I kiss you?”

His lips tease the soft tip of her tilted chin.

“Och,” she mews, squirming. “That is muchly harder to resist.”

Unlacing the bow in the middle of her bikini, he frees her tender breasts. They bounce apart, round grapefruit where once oranges nestled—he’s so hungry for them, he traces his mouth around each brown bud.

“Touch my wee nips and yer dead,” she warns, breaking character.

“Got it.”

He palms her breast and, towing the line between harsh and too feathery, he presses his teeth to her juicy flesh. She murmurs happily as he inhales the plush give of her.

“No kisses for you if you run away,” he rasps, looking drunkenly up from between her twin lush tits. His lips are damp, parted with wanting. Sunlight ignites his hair like glowing embers, ruffling fiery strands bent loosely around his brow. 

He’s not the kind of prettyful most of the selk lasses gossip about, nay. 

His beauty is otherworldly: pale and iridescent, angled like mythic runes. He must be a faerie, one of the auld folk whose ancient spirit creates worlds with his breath. She feels his tiny universe, stretching and turning inside her. 

Rose worships him with baleful bats of her long lashes, her face tinged with a sheen of radiance. 

“Stay with me, Selkie,” he whispers, his words brushing the tender side of her mouth. He kisses the edge of her smile and she pants, canting her hips beneath him. He’s suspended over her, drinking her lips like fresh fruit, but he will not give her any friction below.

“Ah ah,” his eyebrow quirks. “Swear you’ll stay with me.”

“Show me if yer cock’s worth stayin’ beached fer!” she baits him.

“Say it!” he growls, letting low sparks of dominance glint in his voice.

“Ye ken I canna swear such a thing!” she reels him in. “Selks are wild creatures, ne’er to be tamed!”

“Well then,” he darkens. “I suppose you’ve asked for it.” 

His short red trunks kick off his ankles and they’re naked beneath the late summer sun. 

He rears back.

“On your knees, pretty kelpie lass,” he commands.

Rose turns over with a huff of effort, clambering to get onto all fours. Sand clings to her bare ass and legs like sparkling sugar.

“There’s a good girl,” he purrs.

He grips her thick thighs, adjusting the spread of her legs to accommodate his height as he kneels on one knee. He holds her hips and fills her with a beatific little grunt.

“Ah, yes…” she hisses, eyes stinging with relief. The shoving rush of him pushing into her from behind feels like deep, delicious counterpressure —exactly what her pent up little body needs. The selkie yields, mewling softly.

His consciousness spins with her gratified sounds. She’s so full of him already, it seems deliriously benevolent of him to plunge into her: stretching, piling, _dripping_ into her greedy cunt with every thrust. Her pussy drags on his cock, sucking, swallowing. _She won’t have enough, not ever. That is why she will never go_.

She rocks her hips and angles her ass up higher, her sumptuous cheeks spreading _wider_ to take him deeper. 

“Ung, I’m going to leave myself in every corner of you, Selkie,” he grunts. “Would you really cross the sea back to _Elphyne_ with me swollen like this inside you?”

“No!” she whimpers meekly.

“I didn’t think so,” he snarls through a smirk. “I’ve found how to keep a selkie caught, haven’t I?”

“Ha...how?” Rose bleats.

He bends over her back, whispering in a hushed voice, just above the crash of waves. His words are fithly. Her clit stings, her eyes roll back, her mouth drops open.

_“I’ll keep my pups lodged in that belly of yours so you’ll never wander, my dear. Not ever.”_

Her cheeks burn. She flashes with heat that’s too big for the small vessel of her clit —power bursts inside her like lightning bolts. Her clenching depth is almost unbearably intense but his animal brain is too far gone; his mouth tangs with metal. Wobbling cheeks slap against his hips with every stroke. It’s sacredly obscene, shocking and beautiful. He tips over the brink and spurts into her, giving and giving. 

It’s an irony, that he pretends to demand while pouring his whole, soft, runny self into her depths. When he is finished spending, she folds, panting, onto her side. He guides her gently into the sand with strong, servant arms. Big hands smooth reverently over her skin: a veneration. 

“My darling,” he praises. “My angel.”

He leaves a kiss just over her heart and curls around her in the warm sand. She sighs, endlessly content. There is no doubting that, while he feigns taking or withholding, there is nothing he won’t do for her. She kens it well.

“Stay in the Sound,” is his final demand. His fingertips coast over her naked skin, softening the delivery somewhat. “Hunt as you like, but do not cross into sea lion territory, Rose.”

“I…”

“I won’t risk you.” His gentle stroke tightens into an imploring grip.

“A’right,” Rose says, relenting.

“Thank you,” he breathes, leaving a mollified kiss on her temple.

Breakers foam and rush in, climbing up the sand. Chilled edges of froth lap around their toes before slurping back out to sea. The tide is coming in. 

Barking calls echo across the bay, Rose lifts her head.

Grey seal heads dot the surface of the water, peering inland. Dark, thick-lashed eyes blink pensively, Rose kens from their wee faces the selkfolk have bad newses for her. 

She shudders.

“Ye’ll get me my wee coat then, _mo mhuir_?” she asks, stretching on the sand.

He senses her tension, she can’t hide from him. The scale of scents are starting to sort and clarify in his mind. _Did I just smell the feeling of anxiousness?_

“What are you worried about, Rose?” He rolls over, his ember brows knitting.

“S’nothing,” she shrugs. “Fetch me my coat?” Her shoulder tucks to her chin flirtatiously.

“I suppose…” he says, lips hitching. He grunts as he hauls himself off the warm, silting surface of the beach. Moments later, he walks up the path to the cottage and pulls her huge, slick coat off the rack. He stops. Every hair on his body stands up.

Without knowing why, he slides his arms into Rose’s coat.

Warmth envelops him. He’s pressed against the soft breast of a singing woman, her clear voice resonating against his little ginger head.

_Blow the wind, blow;_

_Swift and low;_

_Blow the wind o'er the ocean._

_Breakers rolling to the coastline;_

_Bringing ships to harbor;_

_Gulls against the morning sunlight;_

_Flying off to freedom._

The vision passes and he finds himself on his knees, gasping. He stands with slow, foggy motions, slipping out of the coat and gathering himself shakily. Through the open frame of the doorway, seagulls peal with plaintive cries.

He holds the coat away from him.

_Who am I?_

+++ 

By the first week of November, the skies hang with heavy grey. Rainstorms are drawn in by the pressure vacuum made by the Cascade Mountains and they linger, spitting and drizzling on the Skagit Sea. 

Their rhythms have taken an air of suspension, of waiting: they don’t go out on the weekends but stay nested, cozy and hidden. Long evenings are whiled away reading Jules Verne under piles of quilts by the wood stove, lazy Saturdays pass opening the slew of packages with tiny things from the LL Bean and Woolworths catalogues. The future hangs in a foggy veil behind the day their baby comes. 

Thick plunks patter on the metal roofing of the lighthouse cottage when he wakes up. 

His lashes feather up and down, eyes adjusting to the cool moonlight filtering into their bedroom. The streamers and scarves have been taken down and put away (“I needs it to be clearly and openish like the deepy waters,” she says.) As he rouses from his sleep, the room has taken on a mysterious look in the molten mercury sheen of night. 

He reaches across the bed: it's empty. The mattress squeaks and valleys as he throws his feet over the side. 

There’s a light clinking in the kitchen. He gets up, throws on sweats and an old tee and pads through the dark-washed cottage toward the noise.

“Rose?”

She’s standing by the sink with a glass of water; a full moon pours onto her dewy skin through the droplet-speckled pane. Her cotton lawn nightdress hangs from her shoulders and skims her softened curves down to her ankles: a garment almost chaste, but for its completely sheer fabric framing her full, lustrous silhouette. In the milky light, she is all Gaia: a round, blooming fertility goddess made of silver-touched diamond. His breath catches.

Her brown eyes settle on him.

“I couldna sleep.”

He drifts toward her, stepping into her radius with a worshipful hesitance. His hand slides up her elbow to her bare shoulder. 

“Come to bed?” he says, around his lips pressed to her forehead.

“I’m feelin’ wakish,” she whispers. “Nervousable.”

“What are you thinking about?” His fingertips slide instinctively up her back, pressure seaming along the spots she’s been asking him to rub at the end of a long day.

She hums and nuzzles her face against his shirt.

“I’m thinking I need yer cock,” she murmurs slyly.

He chuckles.

“You are insatiable lately.”

“Might as weel get some more time to oursel’ aye?” She sighs, rubbing the upper right side of her bump where a little heel is always jabbing. “A’fore we have someone interruptish alla time?”

His protective hands fan around her stretched belly.

“This one’s supposed to stay in there a little while yet,” he murmurs. “The books say not to be on the alert until thirty seven weeks, and even then new mothers can go after forty. That’s after Christmas.”

“Och, ye and yer wee books!” she scoffs. “I dinna want to wait so long!”

“You think it will be sooner?”

“The bairn feels pusheded to the verra edge of me, like I’m about to ‘splode and I might feel better fer it,” Rose says with an exhausted huff.

The blood drains from his face. He looks down at her belly like he’s holding a time bomb.

She eyes him, verra weel aware he’s scairt outta his pantses about the day the bairn is borned. Rose isna afraid, the ancientest knowing lives in her bones. 

“A thousan-jillion women dids this a’fore,” she murmurs, her fingers pushing back loose locks of his hair. “My body kens better than books, _mo mhuir_.”

“I know.” His eyes float closed, letting his expression ease with her persuading, feather-light touch.

“Yer always so concernish and seriousabe.” Rose wiggles against him. She wants him to soothe her secret dread, to assuage the apprehension she doesn’t dare tell him about.

“Sorry,” he chuffs. His wife’s stroking fingertips are making his lap start to jerk and shudder.

“Fouk me, a’cause ye love me then?” She beams.

“That seems reason enough.” A wicked grin spreads across his face. Rose scampers toward the little kitchen table. He lunges, catching her about the hips.

“Aiiiieeee!” she shrieks. 

“Ha!” he barks. “Not fast enough!” 

He lifts her, setting her on the table. Skimming hands coast up the outside of her tingling thighs, he rucks up her nightdress. 

“Spread your knees for me, little Selkie,” he whispers, his mouth teasing her ear. 

She opens for him with a sigh. Her thighs part and peel back dripping lips, pooling onto the table. Carefully, he lowers her onto her elbows so her hips are tipped up into view. Her cunt is flushed with anticipation for him, her clit peeps desperately from its petite pink hood. 

He stands over her, tenting menacingly inside his pants, bed hair mussed and rakish, eyes gleaming.

“Look at you,” he rasps, his predatory nature humming. “Split open and served for me on the table like a thick, tasty supper!”

“Are ye goin’ to eat me, then?” She’s practically drooling at both ends with the idea.

“No.” His eyes flash. “Since you’re so eager to have your little bairn earthside, I’m going to show you what sort of sex new parents get.”

“Eh?” She squints viciously at him.

He whips out his taut, pulsing dick.

“We’ll have time only for a quick, fast fuck. No warming up, no mouth on that pretty cunt of yours. Just my cock driving into you as fast as I can before the baby wakes up.”

“Och no.” Rose gulps, her pussy squeezing at the thought of him pistoning into her at top speed. He is the most deliciousable sea monster.

“We’ll have to sneak around our house, stealing fucks until every last child is grown.” He strokes his hardened length twice, spurting a bit of eagerness onto his fingers.

“Truly?” she whines.

“And if you’re lucky…” His brows flick. “...I might even let you come every once in a while.”

She swallows again thickly, his bassy provocations hit like zaps to her clit again and again.

He rubs his thick-knobbed head against the gushing mouth of her pussy. The velvet pad of his tip swirls around her sopping petals: a frustrating tease. Her pussy is already so achy and engorged with the pressure of her full womb, he’s driving her insane.

“I need ye!” she begs.

“Come now, what do we say?” he scolds, fingertips strumming her sensitive petals.

“Pu...please?”

Before the word has finished on her tongue, he’s loaded her with his cock. She wails with his fast thrusts.

“Shhh!” He claps a hand over her mouth. “None of that now, I won’t have our little extended houseguests hearing us!”

His eyes lock with hers as he stuffs her all the way to his hilt, slowing to long, punishing draws that make her silence almost excruciating. Rose wants to whine, to squeak and howl with his delicious filling but her throat holds back every sound stirred by his cock. The tension compounds inside her.

“Good girl.” He smiles with sweet malice. He speeds up again. Fat, mean hardness parts her tender walls with vicious abandon. Pale fingers snake down to her clit and circle vigorously.

He’s anchoring himself by holding her hips down on the table’s edge. Her elbows slip and she’s on her back, swimming in wild coils of shiny black hair as she bucks and writhes against him. He loves how she looks just now: flushed and overfilled by what he’s done to her. The sight of her stokes his monstrous ocean animal nature into brilliant, licking flames.

His back arches, he leans, dragging his cock up against her sensitive inside ridge and she starts to unravel.

“No!” he snarls, easing up on her clit. “Not yet!”

Rose chokes on a pathetic mewl. She teeters on the edge, feeling the distant sound of stormy waves building in the back of her ears.

His deep, motoring prods accelerate; every fast-sink into her throbbing cunt moves aside her worry. _He’s here. We’re goin’ to be together forevers. Nobunny can stop us._

He pounds into his mate; taking, keeping each of her secret, soundless cries to tuck away into his heart. He doesn’t know the nature of his wife’s apprehension, but he can be there for her. He wants to snatch up every second with her with the greed of a man starved. His core starts to spark and blister as he reaches his brink.

“Come for me, selkie girl,” he says in a raspy whisper.

Rose is already spiralling with waves of pleasure, it’s like ripples that fizz from the crown of her head to the tips of her fingers. She breathes a series of catches and sighs as his spine judders with the sensation of splitting at its base: he spends into his selkie wife with flashes of blinding heat.

“Unnng! Jesus… oh God, Rose!”

She comes back into herself soon enough to see his face twisted in abandon, his perfect reverence and adoration for her written in every feature. This holy glimpse brings a prick of moisture into the corners of her eyes. _I love him._

“Love ye, forevers,” she says quietly.

“Sweet Rose.” His hands shake with exertion as he pushes back her hair from her face. “I will always love you.” He leans over her and kisses tenderly. It wasn’t a kiss that turned the world on its axis or froze the frame for its passion, but he would cling to it for years after.

With a hand, he pulls Rose up and helps her slide precariously off the table.

“Easy, lass” he grunts, his mouth tucking upward in one corner. “Ready for bed?” He’s eager to have her tucked up against him under the warmth of soft blankets with the sounds of rain lulling them back to sleep.

“Aye,” she sighs, contentment seeping from her satisfied body and starry eyes.

A chill creeps into the air and the selkie freezes. Even her mate can sense it, human though he is.

The door handle jiggles and a key slots in with an angry twist.

His eyes meet with Rose. She is bristled, standing like a creature of murderous intent or a soldier at the brink of battle.

“Mean man,” she growls.

The blood in his veins stills. 

“Fuck.”

The door swings open.

Brendol Hux is a shadow at first. With the moon hidden, his shape is not lit, nor is his shrouded body clear in his son’s vision as he steps inside the cottage. Still, Armitage envisions the expression on his father’s face.

Two more heavy, possibly drunken steps later brings that bloated face into view, features distorted with perverse rage. His clothes are oversized, like he had been issued them from a failing institution; they were dirty from travel. His hair is matted like he hasn’t washed for days. Still, the look of entitled, scornful contempt is as familiar as the day Brendol left.

Armitage Hux has a theory about his father’s wrath. 

An object in motion is likely to stay in motion, and an object at rest is likely to stay at rest. Likewise, in the past, the more Armitage could control each detail to assure that their miserable old life stayed the same, the less likely his father would be set off into violence. The greater the deviation, he calculated, the higher his father’s anger would spike. It was this function that was playing out in his head as his father walked into the home they had shared for over two and a half decades. 

_The furniture is rearranged, there are dozens of shells, driftwood and new things everywhere, he was in jail, I haven’t called for months, a woman lives at the lighthouse now, and she’s very unmistakably pregnant._ The factors escalating toward explosive, unmitigated fury were staggering. He steps in front of Rose.

“Armitage,” Brendol wheezes. “Where the fucking hell have you been?”

Rose’s growl engages the dark, ripping sound of her flanged vocal chords, but her mate holds out his hand. 

_Let me do this,_ he tells her with his pheromones. He is hardly even conscious that he employs this prehistoric gift of his ancestors. He’s never done it before.

“I could ask you the same question.” He surprises himself with just how much confidence buttresses his words. “I’ve been upholding the lighthouse contract and keeping up my job. Where have you been?”

“I’ve been in fucking jail!” Brendol snapped. “I was set up! Some fucker stashed their drugs in my truck and called the cops.”

Armitage is shocked when he picks up no deception in his father’s scent. His mind flits to images of Rose, slipping into the bay with a secretive look on her face. Grey seal heads bobbing off the shoreline, vanishing and appearing with clandestine intentions.

“Who would bother to set you up?” he snarls, hoping to gauge his father’s suspicions. 

Instead of answering, Brendol’s wild eye lands on another target.

“Who the hell is this?” he demands.

“None of your concern.” Armitage draws the line with cold annunciation. “I want you to leave.”

“Armitage...Armitage.” Brendol’s voice slickens, he becomes oily and fluid. The mocking tone burns his son like acid. “Did you fuck some some little game girl, —you son of a gun!”

“Brendol!” he snaps, his voice dropping. He squares himself up to the opposition with a surge of protective wrath. “I am ordering you to go now!”

His father saunters closer, leaning an elbow on the back of a dining chair like he’s home. 

“What did I tell you about pricking girls between the legs, Armitage?” Brendol sneers at him. “They swell up like a dead deer!”

“OUT!” Armitage’s throat flares with deep, animal rage. “GET OUT!”

A black barrel glints in the dark and Armitage hears a deadly click of an ammunition chamber rotating into place. His heart sinks into the floor.

“Now, that just won’t work for me, son. This is my house; if anyone isn’t where they belong, it’s you and your whore.” 

The father’s slippery voice creeps like icy lead down Armitage’s spine.

“Fine.” He switches to damage control, his breath seething. “We’ll go.”

The son shifts to the left slowly, testing his father’s intent. Rose pivots out from behind him, eyes like daggers.

“Ye’ll leave my mate alone if ye wants to live,” she threatens.

“No...” Brendol nearly drops the pistol. His eyes snap between Rose and Armitage. “Tell me you didn’t, Armitage…”

Rose creeps toward him.

“Stay right there,” Brendol warns. “What do you take me for, some kind of idiot? I fucking know what she is. It was you, wasn't it? You and your fucking water witches, stealing my engine and setting me up!”

 _Is that true, Rose?_ Armitage can’t help but let the question escape from his skin.

 _I’ll do anything to protect you._ He detects her reply. 

The silence that hangs around them tastes like poison on Armitage’s tongue. He can hear his own pulse hammering in his ears. _What the hell does Brendol want?_

“You know who you remind me of, son? You remind me of myself.”

Armitage’s throat knots. 

“I’m nothing like you.”

“I bedded a strange woman from the ocean once.” Brendol’s smile gleams in the moonlight like yellowed, chipped piano keys. “Did you know that, boy? That your mother was one of them?”

The son’s pulse drops.

“You didn’t know?” Brendol cackles. “Ask your seal woman, she’ll tell you!”

“Leave her out of this!” he hisses. 

A piercing yowl fills the cottage.

“On land she was called _An Seula Mòr Ruadh_ ,” the selkie says. “The Great Red Seal, a queen among our kin. If a selkie wife’s mate is bad, she can take back her coat and bring her children awa’ to the land of the faeries.”

Rose drives a savage glare at Brendol.

“This man killed her.”

The gun goes off so quickly Armitage isn’t able to react. Death whizzes by his ear and splinters into the back wall.

His wife, however, leaps at Brendol and pins him to the floor. The pistol flies out of his hands and spins across the linoleum. Rose shoves her knees against his chest and shoulder, her teeth sink into his throat.

If only he had thought, but he doesn’t think, he acts on pure instinct. 

Armitage shouts raggedly.

_“WAIT!”_

To this day, he would ask himself why he shouted, why he interrupted the execution of a murderous abuser. Everything would have gone differently had he let Brendol die then.

Maybe he was afraid of what killing would do to Rose. More likely, he felt what often lies at the center of the deepest wounds, that core which makes abuse all the more painful: the smallest, infinitesimal speck of love.

Rose looks up at him, blood pouring from her lips.

That was all Brendol needed.

He wrenches an arm free and lands a sickening blow into Rose’s side.

“No!”

Armitage dives toward her as she crumples with a weak, strained sound. He picks her up frantically, feeling her body tense against him like a great, tightening spring. 

Brendol had already crawled across the floor and retrieved his gun. The cocking sound draws his son’s eyes up.

“Take me,” Armitage’s voice is calm. “We can go, just you and I. You have a Canadian citizenship, yes? The lighthouse in Vancouver has been looking for somebody for months. We can go there. Everything will be the same.”

Brendol stands on shaking knees, his weapon is trained at his son and the selkie. His breath saws heavily, his eyes glaze with bloodshot veins but his spinning mind latches on his son’s quiet logic. 

The father is not the only one with hold on the son, but inversely, the son has built into the father’s psyche a failsafe. Decades of placating and gentle maneuvering have made Brendol vulnerable to Armitage’s convincing speech, whether he knows it or not. At any rate, his son’s promises are an immediate alternative to any unknown escalation the faking selkie could be hiding, for surely all the sea wenches are liars. 

“C’mon,” Brendol gruffs, his nerves beginning to smoothe. He keeps his gun pointed at Rose, but motions for Armitage to join him.

“Dinna go wi’ him, _mo mhuir_!” Rose weeps.

“Don’t worry about me.” He smooths her shoulders. His eye catches a splotch of red blooming on her night dress between her legs. “Oh my God, Rose…”

“Get on with it, boy!” Brendol snarls.

“Let me call an ambulance,” he gasps, his tactics unraveling. He looks up at his father, hands shaking.

“Don’t you see it's a trick?” he says, foaming with anger. “Those nasty sea bitches will do anything they can to fool you, Armitage!”

Ignoring his father, Armitage stands and steps decidedly toward the telephone on the kitchen counter.

“Touch that and I’ll shoot, boy!”

“She’s in danger!” he snaps. “The baby!”

Rose starts to stand.

“Stay back, bitch! If either of you move, I’ll shoot!”

“Just let me make the call, then I’ll go,” Armitage pleads. “I swear.”

“Don’t you understand, son? The selkie women are magic, they will fuck with you until you give them exactly what they want. Then they make for the sea and you have nothing!” Brendol steps toward the coat rack. Rose stiffens. “This is the problem!” He snatches up Rose’s shining, speckled coat. “Without this, women do what _we_ want, boy!”

“Put that down, I said I’ll go!”

“Don’t let an animal like her run your life, Armitage!”

Brendol holds the coat up and points his gun at it.

“STOP!”

The bullet rips through the coat, leaving a hot, seared hole right in the middle of its back. The coat drips with blood as if he has pierced living tissue. Rose gasps and grunts with pain, she clutches at her back like she can feel her coat bleed. Armitage flies to her with a cry.

“Don’t look at me like that, I did you a favor!” Brendol snaps. “Now for the last time, come with me now or I will shoot her in three…!”

Armitage lays Rose gently on the floor.

“Two…”

He whispers in her ear, “Do not follow me, whatever you do.”

“One!”

The son stands, his eyes red-rimmed, his heart finally steeled with the decision that his father has forfeited any right to continue breathing.

 _I will end this and come back, Rose._ He tells her as he crosses the room.

 _I’m coming after you,_ she replies.

_Absolutely not._

_My sisters are here, mo mhuir._

“Finally,” Brendol snorts. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

He keeps the barrel of his pistol yawning at his son’s head as they crunch across the gravel drive and get into the rusty pickup. His father is no fool, he’s careful not to let his guard down.

As they blaze down the driveway, his mind churns. He cycles through plans to stop Brendol, _to finish him._

“I got somewhere to stay in Oak Harbor,” Brendol says stiffly as they merge southbound onto Highway 20. Armitage does not respond. The wobbling in his father’s driving concerns him, but he wonders if it might work to his advantage.

The road traces Fidalgo Bay, winds around Lake Campbell and Pass Lake. The waters glitter at him, light refracting in little glints of hope that calm his ragged breathing. He takes them, snatching up each wink like somehow the sea will help him think of a way to get back to Rose.

Up ahead, the cloak of pines lining the road disappears, the land breaks and Deception Pass opens up like a vast, dark emptiness below them. The bridge looms high above the water, but under the brilliant sheen of the moon, he can see a group of heads down in the cut like shining grey pearls, waiting for them below.

He cranks down his window a crack.

 _“Mac Ruadh! Mac Ruadh!”_ the seals bark.

_Are they calling me?_

“The fuck are you doing?” Brendol drawls, he gives his son a narrow, sneering glare.

“Watch out!” Armitage cries.

The truck has drifted from their side of the road and blinding headlights stun them with fatal glare.

Brendol swerves. Metal and cement screech; bending, crumbling.

Armitage feels his stomach dive and hurtle.

They’re falling.

With surreal horror, the white-capped surface of the Sound grows in the view of the windshield.

Then, they plunge with a frothy rush into Deception Pass. 

The water gulps the truck down, engulfing them in soundless emptiness. They sink, sucking into the depths of the cut. The truck’s lights only saturate a few dozen feet into the green void.

Brendol screams. 

He stomps and jams his feet on the breaks and the gas pedal as if the maddened repetition of useless behavior might somehow result in a different outcome. The sea spurts into the cabin of the truck through the crack in the window, pouring onto Armitage. He sputters, throwing his weight against the door. 

While Brendol frantically twists the steering wheel and curses through bitter tears, Armitage stops. The water gurgles in through the bottom of the truck, pooling with icy chill around his waist. It pushes against the door like a firm, powerful hand holding back his escape. He lets the handle drop out of his grasp when reason returns to him: any physics book would tell him the door can’t open until the water fills the cabin and equalizes the pressure. He sits back and sips air into shallow lungs.

Something thick and fleshy slaps his window. The pounding sound repeats, this time on both sides of the truck. The panes web and fissure with each blow. Armitage leans away.

One more slap and the window bursts with a torrent of water. He’s shoved into Brendol, but he feels hands grabbing and yanking him. With a burst of pain, his arm catches on a jagged edge of glass and he’s pulled free. 

In the headlights of the descending truck, he can see Brendol has been rescued as well, but it is not for his salvation.

The grey seals surround him, tearing into his flesh with their teeth. Plumes of red pour in misty tendrils from his shredded skin. Muscles glisten pink where they’re exposed up his arm and on the side of his jaw like a macabre smile. He twitches and writhes, his hands reach toward nothing as the selkie women pull him apart. When they rip him open and spill the pulsing, fatty tubes of his bowels, Armitage looks away.

One of the grey seals tugs at Armitage, reminding her sisters that this soft human needs air. His lungs burn as they push him upward. When finally he breaks the surface with a desperate, sobbing gasp, he realizes who the little seal is.

“Rose!”

“Dinna fash, _mo mhuir_.” 

Her face peeps from her seal hood, though he can feel her sleek body bump against him; her tail beats rhythmically against his legs.

“My darling girl,” he coughs.

“Yer safe.” She presses her forehead to his.

Silvery forms swirl about them, pulling them along in a swift current. He thinks he’s in a sort of water chariot, the way the selkie women boil up a wake around him as he clings to their backs. Rose too is carried, and in the brilliant moonlight he quickly sees why.

“You’re hurt!” He reaches for her. _I told you not to follow me!_

Rose smiles weakly.

“Selkies are fierce and protectly fer their mates,” she says. 

Her flesh is torn where Brendol shot her coat, as if by embodying her selkie form to save him, she had accepted the cost of wearing broken skin. 

“You didn’t have to do this.” Emotion claws at his throat.

“My sisters wouldna found ye wi’out me.” It seems to require considerable effort for her to suspend herself between human and seal. She takes a rallying breath.

“I love ye,” she whispers in his ear. 

Her face fades into a sweet brown-eyed seal.

“Rest, my Rose.” He strokes her glossy head. 

Her thick lashes bat balefully at him and his heart wrenches. In the burgeoning light before dawn, a purple-red rivulet of blood trails down her back. Packing it with strips of his tee shirt doesn’t seem to help. When a familiar blinking spire rises in the shoreline ahead, Rose is slipping away.

“Stay awake for me, Rose.” He rubs her cheek, fingertips brushing her whiskers. “Wake up, my sweet.”

He is weak, shaking with exertion and bitter chill. The wake halts and the selkies draw apart, some with Rose and some with Armitage.

“Wait!” he cries, “What are you doing? Rose! I want to be with Rose!”

He’s coughing, choking as the selkies push through the current, cutting a frothing V formation. As the shore nears, the water churning on either side of him changes; their great, pumping tails have become legs. He feels arms around him and glimpses shining black hair.

The rocky beach hits his feet with blunt force. Before he can turn to look at his rescuers, they’ve placed him, wobbly and unbalanced, in the shallows. 

“Where’s Rose?” he rasps after the departing shapes. 

One stops, she turns and he can make out a woman, much like his wife, peering from under the hood of her sealskin coat. 

“She verra unwell,” the selk sister says. “We saves her now, you waits.” She closes her cloak around her body and dives back under the surface, disappearing with an unfurling stroke of her spotted tail.

He crumbles, his knees meeting the beach with a hard shock that knocks the wind out of him. 

_No_. 

A few dozen yards from the shore, he can see a circle of silvery gray seal heads bobbing in the water. They’re huddled, the tension about them dark, like a shadowed rain cloud. He cranes to see Rose.

Cold air bites his lungs as he sucks it in and out. He hauls himself to standing, trepidatiously pulling his bleeding arm from against his body. A hot, stinging gush pours from his limb.

 _Fuck!_ Teeth set, a growl reverberates in his chest. _There’s no way in hell I’m staying here._

He pushes into the water toward Rose, shoving curtains of droplets with his hips when the dizzy blackness starts to clutter his vision. He sways. It’s all he can do to stagger back to the shore.

“Ugh, God!” 

His teeth clench with frustration. Heavy bleeding paints his arm an alarming bright red streak. Slumping onto the rocks, he weakly unclasps his belt and cinches off his circulation above the laceration. His movements are slow and shaky. His joints have started to feel like jello, but after an excruciating length of time, he manages to rip another strip off his shirt and bind the wound.

He’s just starting to stand with every intention of diving into the bay for his wife, when a low, mournful cry echoes across the water. His chest splits. The selkies are gone.

“No, wait!” 

The ocean is still. 

The sun peeks over the gloaming blue angles of the Cascades, streaking lilac, peony and magenta across the sky. The water is glassy and calm. He paces the shore.

“Rose!”

A ripple.

Then bubbles.

A burst of silver and amber sealskin, loose black hair spilling down brown shoulders. Briney eyes, dripping with sadness.

He rushes to her.

And stops.

“Where is she?” he chokes. “Where’s my Rose?”

“Sister was not well.” The selkie’s face twists. “We tooked her to our world.”

“Your world…” he flusters. “Take me there, take me to her! I’m one of you, I can go!”

The selk gives him a sad smile.

“Don’t just stand there!” he cries.

“She was too hurted, shinyhouse boy.”

“No,” he pants. Bright, seafoam eyes widen with shock, he’s scrambling for words, denial, argument while his cheeks pour with the brutal sting of acceptance.

“She’s alive and safe, wi’ the faeries.” The sister reaches one hand to touch him.

“You didn’t let me say goodbye!” he whispers painfully, shrinking away.

“There wasna time. The current between worlds flows only at twilight and dawn, yer wife wouldna survived waiting, _Mac Ruadh_.”

He reels back, bending like he’s been punched in the gut. 

Breaths come short; he can’t fill his lungs. Eyes sting and blur. 

He clutches his body: swallowing, holding back, pushing down until the force of it bursts with a shredding cry. It’s the sound of his heart ripping in two.

_Howling, baying, cursing, crying._

He tears his clothes and beats his own flesh. He mourns with the oceanic wildness of the mate he’s lost.

When he finds himself again, bruised all over and leaking blood from a split lip, the selkie women have all gathered on the shore. They watch him silently, but not a soft brown eye is dry.

One final sister rises from the foam, and all turn to watch as she steps ashore. The sea queens part, letting her approach. He crouches there shivering, bleeding, feeling like there’s nothing they can do to tear him down more. His resigned eyes watch her draw near until she’s standing over him.

“Get up, _Mac an t-Seula Mór Ruadh_ ,” she says. “Son of the Great Red Seal.”

The selkie opens her coat.

A cry, soft as a lamb, jolts his pulse back to life. Inside the selkie’s coat, a tiny form pedals pink limbs. 

He gets up, pain fleeing from him, breath stolen. 

“Oh!” he melts. “It's you!”

Shakily, he takes the baby in his big hands. He shoots furtive looks at the selk auntie as he settles the frail, tiny angel in his uncertain grasp. The selkie sheds her warm coat and wraps them together.

“She’s so small.” Warmth flashes across his moisture-streaked face.

Her head is dusted with fine copper hair, fiery as the first rays of morning. Little ears curl like tiny shells, no bigger than his thumbnail. He brushes his fingertips against her pursed lips —they’re even pinker than his. Wisps for brows scrunch together pensively over eyes shaped like her mother’s. 

_Her mother_. 

He breaks again. He chases the teardrops on her skin with kisses, knowing his lips trace the memory of Rose’s goodbyes.

“The bairn is verra wee, _Mac Ruadh,”_ the selk warns him, “Ye must take her to yer healers right quick.”

“Come,” an elder selkie sister ushers them toward the cottage. “Into the shinyhouse!”

They flock around him like a pushing current, bringing the dazed father and his new baby into the house. One sister puts a kettle on and another holds the baby inside her coat while a third gets him into dry woolens.

“Hallooo?” A selk auntie holds the white telephone receiver to her face. “Is this the niney-one-one? Getchyer wee ambulances up heres to the shiny house on Beacher’s Point. As fast as yer arses can carry ye! Dere’s a wee bairn who needs ye!”

Not long later, a wail winds up the gravel road. Paramedics burst into the house to find a broken young man holding a premature infant, less than an hour old, wrapped in a strange, spotted grey fur coat.

+++

The monitor beeps with his tiny one’s pulse, each chirp cruelly needling him awake while at the same time keeping his heart afloat. His mouth tastes dry and bitter. Exhaustion is a thick film over his eyes, dulling his features as he stares into the incubator. He’s leaning with his elbows against his knees, his face inches from the plastic shield.

 _How can her fingers be so tiny._ They look wrinkled and old, miniature details sculpted out of fine, pink wax. Every time she stirs or twitches, he can feel his pulse jar.

“Nurse!” he says sharply. “Her heart rate is up!” 

The tired night nurse clogs over to him and lifts the sheet printing out slowly with each register of the baby’s tiny heart.

“All within normal range, dad,” the nurse tries to sound comforting. Nothing can comfort him. He puts his head in his hands. Nothing.

“The doc on duty tonight lets us try this thing they do in Central America called Kangaroo Care. They say it works wonders for temperature regulation in preemies. Might make you feel more useful?” The nurse’s eyebrows perk.

He looks up at her stiffly, his face not registering that he’s heard a word. But he responds. 

“Anything.”

“Ok, dad.” The nurses wheel the incubator into a room where he climbs onto a sterile bed with the back cranked up so he’s propped upright. 

“Take your shirt off,” the nurse says.

“What?”

“Your shirt.” She gestures. “Skin to skin, it’s been shown to dramatically improve baby’s stats.”

His ragged tee comes up and over his ears, ruffling his copper hair. He feels bare and exposed as he sits back on the hospital bed. _Bereaved._

All of that changes as the nurses lift the plastic shield off the incubator and bring him his daughter, still attached to a feeding tube and half dozen monitoring wires. His eyes light up, his blood quickens.

They place her against him, skin to skin, heart to heart.

“Hello,” he croaks. Emotion rushes in, welling up to the edges of his eyes. “Sorry you had something of a time getting here.”

Her pink skin looks translucent; just under the surface, impossibly thin veins lace like blue webs down her arms. She makes the smallest scuffing sound. He can hear her lungs whistle through her nose and his heart wrings. Every little squeak and twitch makes him awe and gush inside, a love-struck blindness reserved for new parents, all of whom believe such things to be entirely new.

It lances through him again: _Rose should be here. Rose would know what to do for her._ He never wanted to do this alone.

His lips brush her downy, feather soft head. He’s all she’s got. The thought unfolds like a promising little blossom —she’s here for him too.

He doesn’t really sing, so he whispers the tune in his daughter’s ear.

_And I need you now tonight_

_And I need you more than ever_

_And if you only hold me tight_

_We'll be holding on forever_

The baby opens her eyes for the first time.

His chest stutters and cracks open, rushing with endless love for her that will never dam, not as long as he lives.

Her eyes are brown.

  
  



	5. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OK! Here is our happily ever after, my friends!!!
> 
> Thank you so much for following this story, would you please tell me what you think when you finish reading?
> 
> Happy Halloween!!
> 
> Thanks, Fir, for your amazing Beta skills!!

He pulls up to the curb and hushes the purring motor of his Lexus. 

His understated, silver diver’s watch peeks up at him from under the sleeve of his Italian wool pea coat. He’s early.

The trees lining the sidewalk outside Greenwood Elementary have crescendoed all month with brilliant umbers, crimsons, and ochres, but now they’ve fallen silent. Bare grays and browns shroud the Ballard cityscape, rainfall paves the streets with silver.

He clicks on the heated seat for her in the back. Not that she needs it, really. She’s too much like her mother.

It still stings him, all these years later. Her void is felt every birthday, every holiday, every lazy Saturday —every moment, if he’s honest with himself.

His phone buzzes. He hits the green button with a leather-gloved thumb.

“This is Hux. Yes, tell Mitaka to prepare the client briefing with our new mockups. The client is importing a new line of specialized aircraft parts, which required a shift in the design. I’ll go over it with everyone on Monday... Listen, I won’t be available this weekend, I’m taking my daughter out of town for her birthday. Thank you.”

When the phone drops from his face, the doors of the school have flooded with small, darting children in various shades of puffy jackets. His heart lifts.

He pops open his door and steps outside into the biting, damp cold. Droplets of soft, misting rain cling to his wisping gold eyelashes and the edges of his slicked-back hair.

One shimmery blue puffy jacket races toward him, light up shoes blinking, red curls streaming out behind her.

“Daddy!”

“Luna!” He scoops her up, tossing her in the air with a wide, beaming smile. 

“How was school?” He opens the passenger side with her still hanging from around his neck and settles her into her booster seat.

“I told everyone about my birthday, and look!” She holds up a piece of construction paper. “Max made me a card during choice time!”

“Look at that, how clever. Sounds like your father ought to have a word with this Max fellow,” he says dryly as Luna buckles herself.

She rolls her eyes.

The drive home is silenced by the chipper chatter of her favorite children’s science tape. He’d prefer to deal with the inane songs warbling the weather cycle or the periodic table than risk sinking into the thoughts that plague him this time of year. Even before she could talk, he realized that she can pick up his feelings just as keenly as her selkie kin. It’s made him more honest with her, yes, but also more determined to suppress thoughts he worries will distress her.

“Are we going to the lighthouse tonight?” Her brown eyes find him in the rear view mirror.

“Tomorrow, sweet,” he says, the skin around his eyes crinkling back at her.

“Is it true?” Her voice changes. “The selkies come back from the land of the faeries after seven years?”

His throat tightens, he has to punch on the breaks to react late to a yellow light.

“Luna,” he looks sharply over his shoulder. “Where did you hear about that?”

She fiddles with her jacket zipper for a moment before responding.

“I looked at your notebook, the one with all the papers and photocopies sticking out of it,” she says, sounding ashamed.

He squeezes the steering wheel, the knuckles of his black leather gloves creak. _It’s probably all nonsense anyway_.

“Just a bit of research, love. The selkie stories are from a long time ago... we don’t really know what’s true.”

“You want to know if Mam will come back.”

It’s really not fair that her nose is built like a lie detector.

“I don’t know, Luna.” _I don’t know if I want to make room for that hope anymore._

She’s quiet. He aches for her, that sweet, brilliant little person with a keenness and an oceanic melancholy that removes her just a bit from her peers. An old soul. He was just the same.

“Are you ready to dress up tonight and get sushi from Sakura’s? Hmm?” he warms.

“Yeah!” Luna brightens. “Sushi!”

Their evening passes like many they’ve shared since he was hired at a top maritime engineering firm in Seattle. 

They return to their beautiful Ballard condo that overlooks the Elliot Bay through sleek, floor-to-ceiling windows two dozen stories high. He knows he wouldn’t bear to live anywhere he couldn’t see the ocean, but this removed vista represents the distance he’s put between his heart and the sea. It’s too much for him to hear her calling out to him from the crashing breakers. 

His selkie senses sometimes help him with business negotiations, but the longer he spends away from the sea, the dimmer his strange nature becomes. The easier he finds it to blend with normal people.

Luna scampers to her lavish bedroom. She picks out a sparkly turquoise sequin dress that he splurged for her at Nordstrom last week and pairs it with glittery shoes and a dress-up tiara. He wears a smart, tailored black suit and a sheeny silk tie that matches her dress without an ounce of irony. They’re a blissful pair hopping into a cab and riding down to Pike Street where he indulges her in every bright, colorful sushi roll she chooses from the upscale Japanese restaurant.

After dessert is inhaled, he sets two brightly-wrapped gifts onto the table. It’s been his way, on the eve of her birthday, to get her two.

“Open the one from me first,” he says, pointing to the larger package.

Paper shreds eagerly. Luna’s eyes widen as she opens a rectangular box and lifts a small, narrow shape out of its red velvet case.

“It’s one of those captain’s things from the movies!” she squeals, delighted.

“A spyglass!” he corrects.

“Aha!” The girl peers into it. “That old lady over there ordered the rainbow roll too!”

“Don’t forget your manners, Luna. It’s for the beach.”

“Ok.” She sets the bronze object back into its box and reaches for her next present. “This one’s from Mam?” 

He nods.

Luna unwraps her package. Still too young to register the meaning of a jewelry box, she emits something of a crestfallen air by the present’s small size. When she opens the box, her eyes change.

“A pretty necklace!”

“Here,” he gets up and kneels by her seat. “Let me help you.” 

He fiddles with the clasp until the gleaming pendant hangs from her neck: a curved teardrop engraved with decorative lines and set with a sea-colored topaz.

“Thank you,” she breathes, holding the pendant so it winks back at her in the soft light. “Do I look like her in this? Do I look like Mam?”

His heart soft kicks against his ribs. The chattering, light clinking sounds of the restaurant fade.

“Yes.” He smiles. “You look just like her.”

+++

The first thing he thinks when they arrive to an empty beach is that perhaps the legends were all myths anyway. What was he expecting, really?

No one usually comes to the beach in November so they have the whole shore to themselves all day.

Luna runs out toward the medium sized rocks by the hushing shore and begins turning them over, watching the crabs scuttle for cover.

“Daddy! Come move this rock!”

He can’t quantify his disappointment. It bites at him, even though he has come back to the lighthouse again and again for seven years with varying degrees of expectation. He’s hoped for it so strongly that he’s dreamed of it a thousand times: sometimes she rises out of the water like Lazarus from the grave, sometimes she rides in on a shell towed by angels like Aphrodite. 

“Daddy!”

He blinks out of his wandering thoughts. 

“That’s quite a large rock! How many crabs do you suppose are under there?”

“Hmm, maybe a hundred?”

“Let’s see!”

He pushes the great rock on its back.

Luna screeches with excitement.

“It’s pandemonium!” he cackles.

A swarm of miniature beach crabs scuttle wildly about, their pinchers clipping crossly in the air as they search for a new home. Their shells shine with dewy saltwater, each the color of beach pebbles: greys, bricks, browns and milks. Some are speckled and some are plain.

“Look at that one, Daddy!”

“My, he’s the very biggest, do you suppose he would like a slice of your birthday cake?”

“No, ew! Crabs eat seaweed!”

“Really?”

Luna squats in her yellow boots over the sand banks, digging with her trowels and buckets all afternoon. She catches dark wriggly things and heaps seaweeds into piles. A lumpy sandcastle takes shape.

He sits in a folding chair and reads _The Old Man and The Sea_ and begins to feel like the former as the latter seethes and slurps out to tide with all the unfathomable mystery neither Hemingway nor Melville nor Coleridge could fully describe. He can’t bear to look at the water’s long, lonely horizon, its endless whitecaps, the undulating greens and turquoises and navy greys. Not after what the sea has taken from him.

He looks at his watch. Perhaps they should go early, it’s becoming too uncomfortable for him to feel his sea monster nature pulse and strengthen with the rhythm of the breakers. He tosses aside his book in frustration and rummages through the cooler. Maybe supper will calm his turbulent mind.

Luna’s birthday dinner is exactly what a child would choose once she’s reached an age when she wants to distinguish herself from a father who’s tried to give her a better childhood than his. She chose hot dogs.

They’re roasting them over briquettes in the park barbecues; their spicy, rich aroma sizzles and snaps because, again, he couldn’t bring himself not to buy the fancy bratwurst —even though she requested the cheap franks like the ones from Mariners games at the King Dome.

Luna snuggles in her folding chair under a blanket. An oversized Mariners ballcap sits just above her eyes.

“Tell me again how you and Mam used to live here?”

“Well.” He’s thankful the roasting brats hides the spike of loneliness that just panged in him. “We shared the little cottage over there in the lighthouse. I kept the lamp going and your Mam hunted for fish.”

“Is she a good fisher?”

“The best! She once caught two giant coho salmon before the end of a sappy old 80s song!”

“That quick?”

“Your mother was quick to catch on to so many things. Everything here was new to her.”

He loosens up, feeling the warmth of Rose’s memory melt away his cold sadness.

“Did you love each other?”

“So very much, Luna.” His mouth twists into a half hitched smile.

The light is fading across the distant waters. Stars peer through the veil of melding horizon colors. 

With his tongs, he arranges the perfectly seared brats into their wheat rolls with a flourish of ketchup and mustard.

“One thing I will say,” he chuckles. “Your mother was a downright miserable cook.”

“That’s a’cause I dinna like yer wee burnted food.”

His heart triple punches and he drops a bratwurst.

“Rose?”

Her sealskin hood is pushed back from her beaming face. The hem of her coat swishes about her bare ankles as she ascends the bluff toward them. Saltwater gleams in her damp hair, her smile shimmers like the sea at sunset.

The dam bursts, he runs to her and scoops her off the sandbank with a grip that wrings her heart.

“My darling Rose!”

“ _Mo mhuir_ , my ocean.”

Their kisses trail with tears and tears dissolve into kisses.

“Is this my bairn, my Luna?”

She’s standing next to her chair, timid, even though she knows her mother’s face from pictures. He senses instantly that she does not know where she belongs. Kneeling beside her, he speaks softly.

“My sweet, you will always be my Luna.” He strokes her hair. “Come and meet your Mam?”

It’s a shy introduction at first, but Rose is clever and draws out her daughter’s sparkling nature with mentions of crabs and sand castles. After they rush to see Luna’s tide pool world and look through her birthday spyglass for a time, Luna leaves her parents sitting on the edge of the sandbank as she gathers up her toys for the night. The last rays of sunset streak over the bay.

“She’s perfect, jes like ye, so smartish and prettyful!”

“Ah, I’ve told myself countless times that she’s got your firey, capable spirit.”

A pause hangs between them. A question he’s afraid to ask.

“Rose.” He clasps her hand. “All the legends I’ve ever read say that the selkies always return to the sea.”

“Aye, so they do,” she nods.

His heart sinks. He’s not sure he could take her departure again. She would leave him drifting on the inside, tumbling off a skiff into the dark. Total eclipse of the heart.

“But I wilna leave fer _Elphyne_ again until yer time here is done as weel. Yer my one, my only, _mo mhuir._ ” 

“You’re staying?” he repeats, dumbfounded with happiness.

“Aye.” She smiles.

They kiss.

Rose presses to him, his hand slides into her coat.

 _Holy mother of god…_ she’s naked as creation in there.

His wildness, for so long on the back burner, crackles and flairs. He’s on the edge of bursting into flames.

A growl motors low in his chest.

They hear Luna’s voice approaching and split apart like naughty teenagers.

“Och, I’ve missed ye so!” she sighs. “Ye’ll take me home wi’ ye then?”

“Yes.” He entwines his fingers with hers. “But there’s just one thing.”

“Eh?” Her brows twitch.

He leans into her, his lips brushing the sensitive skin just below her ear. She shivers.

“We’re going to need a bigger house.”

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks for joining me for this modernized Selkie myth. I'd love it if you left your thoughts in a comment or even sent me a message on Tumblr!
> 
> I'm a huge fan of AUs, let me know if you have any ideas for my next story!

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks fer reading, mateys.
> 
> Check out some of my other stories:
> 
> For a [short, funny and crass GingerRose,](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26006500/chapters/63231019) read about a Dwight Schrute-esque Hux helping Rose get back into the Star Wars Universe.
> 
> For some long, smutty historical GingerRose, save a horse, [ride a Cowboy Hux.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24257374/chapters/58457770)
> 
> Thanks for reading! Be sure to smash that subscribe button to get the next update! 😘


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